‘Pandemic may limit the pressure on county stars’

TO curb costs during the pandemic, the GAA put a limit in place on training sessions with a version of same likely for the inter-county season ahead. Michael Maher sees it as a model for fairer competition.

‘Having a real, defined period where teams were allowed to train together and a limit on the number of sessions, bar the Dublin steam train I think it brought a lot of counties in the provinces a bit closer together because they couldn’t have the edge that maybe their own individual finance might have allowed them in years gone by.

‘Having only three collective sessions a week showed that – a team like Limerick were a great example. Ironically that was the team we gave the closest run in Division 4 but look at how well they competed in Munster. When I read Jim McGuinness’ autobiography, Rory Kavanagh’s autobiography, when McGuinness was with Donegal, between gyms in the morning, pitch in the evening, they must have been doing the guts of seven, eight, nine collective sessions a week – that’s in either smaller groups or all together.

‘Over here, we’ve always had the three sessions a week. One of the very, very few counties who would have stuck to that. So I do think the pandemic might reset the governance on the whole county thing. And I think it would be healthy for the players as well. Because I don’t think there is any player in the country who would be able to cope with the increasing demands that some counties were putting on players.’