Promise of a ‘club only’ month is already under serious threat
The noble gesture of a ‘club only’ month is fraying at the edges
WHEN it comes to making change, there is a tendency to paint the GAA as a giant iceberg, relatively unmoved by the tides of opinion and prevailing winds.
Except the reality is a whole lot different.
The 2018 calendar involves the most radical change in the history of the association. From roundrobin provincial hurling championships in May to Champions League style groups at the All-Ireland football quarter-final stage in July and August, the overhaul of competition structures alone is staggering when weighed up alongside the previous 133 years of tradition.
At the heart of the overhaul is the decision to make April a ‘club only’ month, devoid of intercounty fixtures bar the Division 1 and 2 finals in the Allianz Football League on the very first day of the month.
Intended to give a fresh primacy to the club game and a grassroots disillusioned with being squeezed into autumn and winter playing windows, that month-long hiatus from inter-county activity is the reason why the season is divided into two frantic scheduling windows either side.
It is why the Allianz Hurling League starts a fortnight earlier than last year with Cork hosting Kilkenny under floodlights at Páirc Uí Chaoimh later this month. It is why the era of the dual player is well and truly over with four double weekends of hurling and football action. It is why the Hurling League final will take place in a novel setting of a floodlit Saturday night in March. All of these changes are underpinned by the noble intention of giving the club player a better fixture of games. But four days into the new year and already that ‘club only’ April window is under threat. Mayo football manager Stephen Rochford (below) was one of the first to fire a shot across the bows, news filtering out that the All-Ireland finalists might be staging a training camp during the month that is meant to be dedicated to the club. Marc Ó Sé of this parish put it bluntly when the five-time All-Ireland winner and current playermanager with An Ghaeltacht said ‘it reeks of absolute disrespect for the status of club players, especially when you consider the hype which had accompanied the fixtures master plan… If others follow Mayo’s lead — and I suspect they will because a lot of the top counties choose April to go into camp — then these modest reforms are already buried.’ And yet it’s easy to understand where Rochford is coming from, given the demands and pressures associated with his position. Last season, Mayo undertook a three-day training camp to Carton House in Kildare at the start of May ahead of a first-round game against Sligo on May 21. This year, Mayo face Galway on the earlier date of May 13, meaning an April camp would allow for a similar timeframe.
The punishment of losing home advantage for their first National
“A clean break would be more workable”
League game in 2019, along with a potential five-figure sum in terms of the gate, is hardly the biggest deterrent. Yet the negative publicity saw that initial plan removed from the table. For now.
Rochford is not alone in questioning the logic in a hell-for-leather glut of fixtures from January to March, then a month-long sabbatical on the eve of Championship when the stakes are greatest.
Already, the very point of the club window has been undermined by the likes of Clare, who don’t see the logic either in playing a couple of rounds of Championship and then putting their main club competition on hold for possibly three months and more. So the plan at the moment is not to stage any county hurling championship games at all and run the competition off in unified fashion when Clare exit the Championship.
The Club Players Association has sprung up in the past 12 months because of the widespread dissatisfaction on the ground, garnering over 25,000 supporters.
Back in November, its chairman Micheál Briody described Croke Park’s reluctance to issue proper sanctions, if necessary, as a ‘cop-out’.
‘If this is policed, you can get certainty in April,’ he told this newspaper. ‘There is an opportunity for them to make it a real positive. Saying we can’t police that is like throwing their hat at it. Giving licence to county managers.’
It’s certainly beginning to look that way.
More and more, it appears that club and county are mutually exclusive, that a clean break in the shape of a two-tier season would be a more workable solution. That would involve ditching April and bringing the All-Ireland finals back even further from their newer dates of August 19 in hurling and September 2 in football.
With the GAA such big business now and with so many financial elements tied in to its operation, right down to the guaranteed share of income for the Gaelic Players Association, that’s not a road that might suit the vested commercial interests.
But the success of the next four months — January to April — will tell whether another leap of faith is required.