GAA have to safeguard April for the club game
IT was just too inviting. So inviting they couldn’t quite help themselves. It was there staring them right in the face, practically begging them to take advantage of it. Five or six weeks at the height of spring just waiting to be used.
With the league over and the championship coming down the line, what inter-county manager worth his salt wouldn’t want to make use of those weeks in April to prepare a team for championship?
You can see where they’re coming from, you can understand the logic of it and you can still be appalled by it. Not just because of the immediate effects of it, but because of the mentality it exposes.
Had the Mayo senior football management team got their way and spirited their team away for a training camp in the month of April it would have been a slap in the face to the club game in the county and the country more generally.
Perhaps they would have been able to organise it in such a way – mid week maybe – to ensure players would have been back in Mayo for club fixtures on the weekend, but even that would have been little more than a sop.
What condition would those players have been in by the time they got back from the training camp? From what we know of them, these camps are pretty intensive affairs. Players train a couple of times a day, so they’d hardly be bright eyed and bushy tailed for club football the following weekend.
It goes beyond even that, of course. It isn’t just a matter of players turning up on the day to fulfil a fixture. Clubs are deserving of proper consideration. They need proper access to their players in order to develop game-plans and to cohere in a meaningful way.
Fundamentally it’s about respect and what Stephen Rochford and his management team proposed showed a lack of respect for the club game. That they’ve since rowed back on it – it was reported on Tuesday that the camp wouldn’t now go ahead – is welcome but far from the end of the story.
That the camp was proposed at all in the first place tells you just how little is thought of the club game at that elite level, if it’s thought of at all. For Rochford and co to propose this in the first year of the new calendar is quite staggering actually. The big selling point of this brave new world is that April is reserved for club football. The indecent haste with which an inter-county management team moved to claim it for themselves should worry anybody interested in the health of the club game.
It suggests that even in April the inter-county game will retain its supremacy. Inter-county teams will continue to train during the month, at least once or maybe even twice a week.
As we say that’s not ideal for club managers or club players, but we have to be realistic. Not great, not the end of the world either. In return for certainty on when their fixtures will be played, clubs will sacrifice a certain amount of access to their star men.
If that’s the price to pay, then it’s a price worth paying. As long as it stops there. The GAA and county boards and clubs need to be extra vigilant on this. Just because Mayo have been forced to stand down those plans doesn’t mean the danger is averted.
Little wonder the Club Players Association are keeping the pressure up for recognition of both their organisation and their issues. They continue to face stiff resistance, but the very fact of that resistance suggests they’re probably on the right path.
They were the ones leading the charge against the Mayo training camp, they were the ones highlighting it last week and they (along with Marc Ó Sé in a blistering Sunday newspaper column) probably did more than anybody to put the kibosh on it.
“It is no surprise to us that this is happening,” Michéal Briody ( left), the chairman of the CPA, said last week. “Croke Park failed to put the April club month into rule. Even when Paraic Duffy launched the master fixtures list, he said it was up to each county board to put it into rule. What was needed was leadership from the top to say that ‘this is a club month, and nobody can break it’.”
With certain provisos, that’s the way it should be. The increasing disaffection of the club player was one of the main driving forces behind this reorganisation. They ought to be the major beneficiaries of it. Otherwise what’s the point of it all been?