NEVER WASTE A CRISIS
GAA can use pause in season to take stock and improve fixtures planning
NEVER waste a crisis. That is a sentiment often associated with unscrupulous employers who take advantage of straitened times to shed workers and slash costs.
There might be enough wisdom in the phrase for the GAA to usefully pursue, too, however.
With the schedules cleared for a fortnight — but possibly much longer than that — it is impossible to predict how the 2020 season will play out.
The leagues are the immediate concern, given how they impact on the proposed B championship, which prioritises the business of promotion and relegation. But the championships could soon be unworkable as envisaged.
And in that case, the practicality and imagination of the GAA leadership will undoubtedly emerge. They will find a way to get the competitions run off, presuming some semblance of normality will have returned to society by the summer months.
Yet in the longer-term, there are lessons to absorb and put to use. An obvious one is that these extraordinary times have already shown how many things in life presumed untouchable, can be adjusted to accommodate the greater good.
In wider society, that manifests itself in people behaving in ways that keep themselves and those around them as healthy as possible.
In the less urgent theatre of sport, the flexibility that has been forced on us, when games can be postponed quickly and without complaint, makes one wonder if the GAA fixtures’ logjam really is impossible to fix.
Perhaps the blank slate that could soon be confronting us finally brings an opportunity to revolutionise how football, in particular, is organised.
Last November, the Club Players’ Association (CPA) withdrew from the Fixtures Review Committee, saying they could not ‘in good conscience’ put their names to a ‘compromised document’.
The CPA further described the committee’s intentions as a ‘Trojan horse’, which were ‘designed to give cover to the GAA authorities to ratify the status quo, while having the appearance of consultation and thoughtful deliberation’.
The language was incendiary but that position has not changed within the clubs’ group, as conversations with senior figures in recent weeks have confirmed.
At the start of December, the committee published their report. There were a host of recommendations in the document, including plans that pointed towards the transformative change many increasingly see as the only way the fixtures’ logjam can be solved.
The report also included ideas that would constitute good preparatory work, for instance the plan to appoint four full-time fixtures’ analysts, one to be based in each province, who would assist counties in making fixtures.
Counties would be obliged to submit their plans for games by the end of December, while intercounty training could not resume before December 1.
This is all sensible, but the difficulty is that enforcing some current regulations — such as when counties can resume training, when they can and cannot go abroad on training camps, and trying to get them to respect April as a month dedicated to clubs — is already impossible.
Adding new ones to be policed only brings in more rules to be broken or ignored. Three possibilities on championship structures were also proposed by the committee — and in all cases, the urgent consideration is football, rather than hurling.
The first would split the football championship into four groups of eight, each of which would be split into two groups of four, seeded based on league positions.
The second involved moving the leagues to the summer months as part of a reformed championship, with the provincial competitions played in the spring.
The third was retaining the status quo.
A significant amount of work clearly went into the committee’s work, but a mood for radical change was not detectable within its pages.
This, allege the CPA, was always the intention of a conservative leadership. The CPA proposals were for a radically changed football calendar that would free up 16 weeks for club games.
They claimed they could achieve this by combining pre-season competitions, the football league and the provincial championships into one competition — regionally based — to be played in February and March.
Seedings for the championship would be contingent on the outcomes of these games, and the format for the championship would see eight groups of four counties.
The top two counties in each group would go into a last 16 and compete for the Sam Maguire; the bottom 16 would contest a B championship.
The club weeks envisaged in the CPA plan would occur between February and September. A shared feature of the most imaginative proposals, both from the Fixtures’ Review Committee and from the CPA, was the dilution or abolition of the provincial football championships.
It was interesting that 46 per cent of those surveyed as part of the committee’s work wanted to abolish these competitions.
But the nature of power in the GAA made that prospect remote.
The provincial councils are important in the current structure of the association, yet outside of official circles — and, in some cases, within them — the provincial football competitions are acknowledged as unwieldy when it comes to attempts to streamline GAA structures.
But it would be a mistake to presume that the main impediment to change is sclerotic officialdom.
That doesn’t help, but as big a problem is the power of the inter-county game.
This was highlighted in Tom Ryan’s candid annual report this year, when he correctly said spending €30 million on the preparation of teams for last year’s championships was unsustainable. The Gaelic Players’ Association responded with a
‘There are lessons to absorb and put to use’
‘A shared feature of proposals was the dilution or abolition of the provincial championships’
statement that was an embarrassing amalgam of selfpity and arrogance, blaring the importance of their members and overlooking the sound points made by Ryan (below).
A truth underscored the figures published by the Director General: they proved that the balance of power within the association has tilted ominously towards the inter-county game.
Managers have far too much power, and this is where any attempt at correcting fixtures and the prevailing culture at the elite end of Gaelic games must start.
Many simply do not care about the plight of club players. They are immersed so deeply in games that now demand staggering amounts of time and resources that the wider damage being done to an organisation they love, either escapes them or doesn’t compete for their attention.
However, as arguments raged last winter and into the spring about the fixtures conundrum, and as the CPA maintain their position that only dramatic change can improve the lot of the club player, the importance of inter-county managers to this debate was too easily overlooked. But without their power being curbed, lasting change cannot happen. They demand suspension of fixtures, and it happens. When counties progress in the championship, club games are immediately vulnerable. And supporters enchanted by the dream of big days in Croke Park are unlikely to protest that their club must fulfil their fixtures, if that comes at the cost of the county team. That was why Ryan’s report was encouraging. In recognising the unsustainability of inter-county costs, he also illuminated the reasons behind those costs. Managers demand support systems befitting a side in professional sport, but not only does this impose financial costs on county boards many struggle to meet, it also makes the needs of the manager the absolute priority. After all, if a board is committing hundreds of thousands to a set-up, they will ensure the manager has all the access to his players that he wants, in order to justify the outlay.
And if clubs suffer as a consequence, it is just another part of the price to be paid.
But now, all of a sudden, it is not just club players left frustrated on the sidelines. They are joined there by the elite.
Finally, a force has emerged too powerful even for managers and administrators.
A truncated championship could be inevitable. We could well see, in the coming weeks and months, that it is possible to radically re-fix GAA games after all. The current hierarchy might not be untouchable.
And after that, lasting change should be embraced for the greater good.