‘People are so sensitive in the GAA now’

ARMAGH legend Oisín McConville has claimed that GAA people are ‘f ***** g so senstive’ and need to be more open to criticism. Analysts, including Pat Spillane, are regularly berated by players and managers for comments they make on programmes like The

Sunday Game, but McConville, a pundit himself, said that he’s surprised by how thin skinned people can be. ‘You have to be honest, you have to call it as you see it,’ he said. ‘Does it go too far? It’s very difficult to know what you can say anymore. We’re f ***** g so sensitive within the GAA. It’s actually scary.

‘It’s very difficult to know what you can say anymore. It’s gone so sterile in the analysis and yet you wouldn’t think that. ‘I do think we get a little bit sensitive around it. ‘Even going back to when I started playing, you just took it on the chin, you shut your mouth and you go on with it. You used it as fuel for the next day or whatever it was. ‘I got a couple of lashings and at the time I wouldn’t have liked it, and it would have annoyed me, but I wouldn’t have been commenting on it. ‘I just would have used it to try to get more out of myself in training or in a match. This thing about us jumping on everything that’s said, people are entitled to say these things.’ Kerry legend Spillane was slated by Dublin boss Jim Gavin for his comments about Diarmuid Connolly’s clash with a linesman last month. All-Ireland winner McConville (right) reckons Gavin only hit out at Spillane to drum up a siege mentality in the Sky Blues camp. ‘I definitely think that was the case with Dublin,’ he added. ‘Dublin don’t do anything by accident. ‘You can’t tell me that with Dublin’s preparation, and the amount of people they have in that backroom team, and everything looking to be nigh on perfect, that Jim Gavin comes out with that off the cuff. ‘I’ve said it before, I think it was manufactured. Well, maybe not manufactured but it was very deliberate. ‘Dublin, I suppose, are slightly different to everybody else in that they don’t need to rely on that sort of stuff because they have a lot of other things going for them. ‘But, definitely, if people think that was a slip of the tongue or something, that’s not the way it was.’