STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN
Kerry’s 37-title haul is in sight and the GAA is doing all it can to help all-conquering Dubs get to the very top step
THE distress played for real in a pained telephone call received this week. It was a Kerry friend at the other end who had finally discovered his breaking point. Last Sunday’s 12-point humiliation had provided him with an eyeful of the future and he had no longer the stomach for looking at it through a cognitive lens.
After all that talk about splitting Dublin in two, Jim Gavin decided to do just that by playing half his team, and in the process still managed to double Kerry’s sense of despair.
But that experience merely fractured my friend’s belief system; it was 48 hours later before it sheared as he read Philip Lanigan, our colleague whose erudite Tuesday column in our daily edition has a serial knack of shining light on reason, who suggested it was only a matter of time before Dublin knock Kerry off their roll of honour perch (they have won 37 Sam Maguires).
My man, with much the same relish as an unfortunate on Death Row marks off a calendar in the countdown to his last Sunday roast, had done the numbers too and found no relief. Dublin currently trail Kerry by 10, but given their current harvesting rate he reckoned it could take as little as a decade and a half for catch-up to be achieved.
It left my middle-aged pal cursing what should be a treasured family trait — he comes from linage gifted with strong hearts — and decided his best hope of cold comfort lay elsewhere.
‘I hope when that day comes I will have Alzheimer’s and I will spend my time believing I am back in 1975,’ he declared.
We only bring that conversation up to underline the scale of the task which confronts new GAA president John Horan, who this week declared his ambition for a two-tiered All-Ireland football Championship to be established by the end of his three-year term.
If there are Kerry folk whose solace comes packaged in the hope their premature dotage will allow them to bother nursing home staff by babbling on about the great young team Mick O’Dywer has coming through, then what hope can a two-tiered Championship structure offer the rest of the Gaelic football nation?
It suggests a neat division of quality and ambition where no such border exists.
At best – and it takes a degree of wishful thinking — by importing Roscommon, Cork, Tipperary and Cavan from Division 2 you could make a case for a 12-team top tier but with no great conviction. But rather than looking at structures which may bring no relief, the GAA might be better addressing the magnificent monster it has created.
There is something horribly meanspirited about pointing out all the advantages which Dublin enjoy, but as undeniably great as Jim Gavin’s team is, neither can it be ignored that their dominance is a strategic as well as a sporting success.
The GAA and state investment in the capital — allied to John Costello’s focused governance — has ensured the delivery on the promise of that Blue tidal wave.
Horan has already gone on the record to declare that he is committed to a rebalancing of GAA funding but it has the feel of bolting the stable door far too late.
In delivering performance-wise on that initial investment, Dublin GAA has almost become a self-sustained entity while any benefits from a fairer distribution of funding for the rest is a decade down the road at best. By then, who is to say what the state of play will be.
It is not that Dublin will not be beaten — that is an inevitability and one which they are not insulated against even this year — but they have taken out insurance against the cyclical whims which are a permanent feature of any truly democratic sport.
There is no way that can be easily addressed in a macro sense, but the least the GAA can do is address micro issues which it has control over.
The most obvious is they still allow the best team in the land to enjoy serial home advantage and for those who see that as a trifling point, every sporting study on the benefits of home field advantage serve to contradict it.
This year Dublin are set to play, if they go all the way to the All-Ireland final, 11 of their 16 games at home including all the ones that matter.
Removing Croke Park as their League base would be a start and the wonder is why that has not already happened.
Their average attendance — perhaps indicative of tedium seeping into their own support base — is running at just over 23,000 per game in the League this spring. It is not that long ago when we were advised that anything less than 30,000 would not justify turning on the electric at Croke Park.
More damning, while the rest will be granted one home game in the Super 8’s, Dublin will get to play two — surely one of those should be moved to a neutral venue.
How does a sporting body retain the clothing of impartiality while showing its money belt with one hand and opening the door of its house with the other all exclusively to the benefit of the same county.
It is a small point but it goes to the heart of the most damaging perception as to why Dublin gets to feel all that love.
The GAA will argue that its investment in Dublin was not motivated by providing its biggest cash cow with the best possible pasture.
But even when the spring milk yields are so marginal they still can’t resist reaching out for that udder.
If the GAA leadership is hoping to deliver reform, it might not hurt if they started by delivering what is within their gift.
Otherwise, we might all be seeking refuge to remember fairer times.