Time to swap GPS for Guinness

FIRST came the GAA statement that there they could confirm that no inter-county games are expected to take place before October, and then, last Sunday, the Association’s President, John Horan, said he couldn’t see how Gaelic games, being the contact sports that they are, could be played as long as social distancing is a priority to deal with the Covid-19 pandemic.

In terms of which comes first - the inter-county chicken in October or the end of social distancing egg - it isn’t much of a choice right now. What we have suspected and dreaded for much of the last few weeks is now written, franked and posted: there will be no GAA Championship this summer.

At best there will be sufficient loosening of the restrictions that will see GAA facilities re-open sometime in July and some form of collective activity for club footballers and hurlers. At worst, we will continue to be tethered inside our homes for most of the time, forced to watch another bloody re-run of the 1982 All-Ireland football final on RTE or eirSport or Dave.

You’d nearly get to believing

Martin Furlong and Matt Connor and Seamus Darby concocted Covid-19 in a lab in Edenderry just so the world would be forced to watch Charlie Nelligan in a perpetual arc in front of the Hill 16 goal.

Anyhow, clarity is what we have now, at least, for a few months anyhow. They say it’s the hope that kills you, but now that’s there’s no hope of a football kicked or a sliotar being struck for the entire summer, something small has died inside all of us who love Gaelic games.

Kerry GAA vice-chairman Eamon Whelan told The Kerryman this week that it was the uncertainty that was killing the players: the training for a competition that none of them knew when it was going to start. Now that the uncertainty has been taken away - now that the next five months will involve no competitive action and possibly not even a return to collective training - that the pressure is off, or should be.

Whelan’s personal opinion that inter-county players should be unburdened of all formal training - albeit just following a prescribed programme in their own place of residence - in the short to medium term is not only refreshing to hear from a high-ranking official, but also happens to feel right.

We know that since mid-March when sports events started to be cancelled and then more and more social distancing restrictions came into play, that inter-county players have been keeping up their fitness levels at home. There has been constant communication between management and players, and the fitness coaches and S&C people have been earning their corn by laying down tailor-made programmes and monitoring same. And that has all been right and proper and necessary and accepted. But what now?

Is it necessary, or wise, to keep players on a training programme for something, as Eamon Whelan puts it, “that is not going to happen for many months time or maybe not at all”?

Horan has stated that GAA facilities will remain closed until July 20 (unless there is a drastic, and unlikely, change in circumstances) which is over nine weeks away, so that’s the earliest when inter-county squads can get together in any meaningful way. We know that players being what they are, that it they will keep themselves in good nick anyway. The jogs and the cycles and the weight training in the homemade gyms will continue anyway, as will the good diet and the regular hydration. The modern inter-county footballer is already conditioned to having a chicken salad and a bottle of water for lunch, unlike the rest of us who might enjoy some scone with our jam, and a coffee with more sugar than caffeine in it.

But, as Whelan says, is there a need now, for the next few weeks, for players to be strapping on a GPS and uploading data on what they’ve eaten, when they won’t see each other or management for another nine weeks, much less see an opposition team another 21 weeks at least.

The fear, of course, is that if we’re not doing it and the other crowd are, then they’ll have the hop on us when the whole circus starts up again. Yet if this pandemic and lock-down has thought us anything it is that all bets are off; that nothing will be the same again; that there will have to be new ways of doing things and new ways of thinking. Could it be that this six-month hiatus of Gaelic games across the whole summer is the opportunity to rip it up and start again.

We have been watching The Last Dance on Netflix these last few nights - the story of Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls basketball franchise in the 1990s - and among many of the delights of the documentary one thing has stood out: Jordan and his team mates are frequently smoking cigars and drinking beers and playing golf throughout what is a long and vigorous and exhausting season. And get this, they even smoke cigars and play rounds of golf before games! Yes, this was the 1990s and a different era - and plenty of GAA players smoked fags back then too - but (a) Jordan and the Bulls were the most dominant and successful NBA team of that decade, and (b) they had lots of fun along the way.

Comparing NBA stars in Chicago in 1990 with Gaelic footballers in 2020 might be an apples and oranges exercise, but there are similarities. Both are elite sports people in their own right, and both want to be the best and win what they can. So how is that Michael Jordan could play a round of golf a day or two before an important game or visit a casino they night before, or smoke a cigar and drink a beer immediately after, with another game a day or two away, and still perform to the best of his ability, while GAA players are scared stiff to walk past a pub, have all but sold their golf clubs, and are bubble-wrapped from anything or anyone that is seen as a distraction from the business in hand, which is playing a game that’s meant to be for fun?

Perhaps the GAA will resume in October or it might be next January or February, or further away than that, but whenever it does come back you’d hope that the time away has given all of us involved in it - players, management, officials, media, spectators - a better perspective on what we don’t have now and what we will have then.

In the meantime, you’d hope that our inter-county men and women would be permitted to put down the GPS and pick up a Guinness for the next two or three months...if they could get their hands on one.