As football slides into ruination, hurling needs a committee for FUN
IF Jim Gavin is anything, he is ambitious, having declared last week he wants to ensure his game becomes ‘the most exciting amateur sport in the world’.
For a brief second, I thought Jim had crossed over to the bright side and was now a fullyfledged hurling man, but as it turns out he was talking about football and excitement. Well, good luck with that.
On a serious note, I am not one of those grating hurling snobs that can only see the bad in every other sport but, given the state of Gaelic football at present, it is hard to say a nice word about it. That said, no one in hurling is in a position to be throwing stones at another man’s glass house.
Jim is heading up a Football Review Committee where the expectation is that they will come up with a raft of rule changes in a bid to make the game more palatable again.
That sends a chill down my spine, because, on so many levels, changing rules is the wrong way to go. It is an admission of defeat, it is an admission that the game as it was designed to be played is not valued and, above all, it does not work.
If you want proof of that, one of the expected proposals that will come from the FRC will be to get rid of the forward mark.
That is a good thing. I grew up in an era where if a forward caught a kicked ball, it was seen, as Roy Keane might tell you, as his job – just like a postman delivering a letter.
These days, if you catch a ball you are one step away from being made Grand Marshal at the St Patrick’s Day Parade, and while you are waiting for that honour they will also give you a free kick at the posts.
That is a mad rule, isn’t it? And I do hope Jim and his cabinet of merry football men ask how was that rule ever introduced in the first place?
The answer is that it was as a result of a rule change that is not even five years old, which was introduced to make the game better but it ended up making a mockery of the fundamentals of defending.
That is what rule changes beget.
I make that point because there is also now a Hurling Development Committee in place to keep the football men company and I just hope that they don’t go down the same road as the FRC.
Its terms of reference are less clear, with the likelihood that the primary objective will be to set out some form of roadmap to develop the game in the vast swathes of this country where it never got a chance to take root.
The quick answer to that is to put in place a director of hurling, hopefully of the calibre of Paudie Butler and Martin Fogarty, two great hurling men who filled that position in the past but were not given the resources to spread the word. The only way the game can be developed is by putting in place a well-resourced and targeted coaching infrastructure that would get boots on the ground in football-dominated counties, backed up by a warning from Croke Park that those counties who do not facilitate that hurling presence would have their central funding cut.
The other way to help hurling is to make sure that the game we are seeking to develop is the game that we want to see developed.
And that is why I fear our game is on the same pathway to ruination as football – but the key difference is that we still have enough road left to save ourselves.
No more than football, the source of poison in our game is the coaching fraternity at an elite level who have put results ahead of enjoyment, success ahead of skill.
It has left hurling with the same symptoms as football, becoming a risk averse game played on laptops rather than on grass, where the ball has become a prized possession rather than something to play with.
That needs to change but not in the way that they are threatening to do so in football, where there is talk of effectively having an offside rule by ensuring that a certain number of forwards and backs have to stay inside the 45 or 65 metre zone during the game.
No good will come from that, it would be impossible to police and it would be impossible to transfer to the club game.
If they introduce it, in five years time another committee of wellintentioned football men will be appointed to recommend getting rid of it.
The key to real reform is not to change rules but to change mindsets. And how can that be done? I would hope that this hurling committee, which includes Brian Cody among its number, will strike at the heart of the game’s illness – the management and coaching mindset that is destroying all that is good.
I read an outstanding column in the Irish Mirror recently by the former Limerick player Shane Dowling, who is fresh enough out of the game to offer an insight into what demands are made of our county players.
IT was a fascinating read but it was also a grim one. In effect, in a regular week in season, players have one day free a week. And even that day, just like the off-season, is never free because you are watching what you are eating, mindful of what your next analysis session will be about and getting into the mindset for your next training session. ‘More fun needs to be injected or else I fear that we’ll reach breaking point before too long,’ Shane signed off in his column. I am out of the game a lot longer than Shane and I have been making that point on this page for the last decade, that the fun is all gone. And how do I know that? Because I have eyes in the front of my head and a brain at the back of it. I have watched as a sport that was designed to be an expressive art form has been distilled down to a GPA print-out. So instead of coming up with rule changes, I hope our committee comes up with a proposal to limit the size of backroom teams, put in place stringent spending caps on team preparation and limit the contact hours that players have to endure. They could perhaps call it the fun charter – and if they do, we are all on board.