CLUBBING TOGETHER Kenoy on end of CPA’S split battle
FORMER Club Players Association chief Tommy Kenoy reckons they would have had to battle on for years but for the pandemic.
Experienced Roscommon official Kenoy was secretary of the CPA which disbanded on Monday night after nearly five years in existence.
The GAA’S decision at Congress to implement a split season for club and county activities tallied with the CPA’S ‘fix the fixtures’ agenda.
Kenoy recalled it “wasn’t a very pleasant battle” and there was a “fairly substantial anti-cpa body” within the GAA.
And he believes that, but for the pandemic, which forced the GAA to implement an impromptu split season in
2020 that worked well, they would still be pushing for change.
Kenoy said: “There’s no question we wouldn’t have got to where we are now but for this pandemic. We were the voice, the 30,000 or so club players and ordinary club members who were advocating all along for what we now have.
“It wasn’t a very pleasant battle. There was some pretty unwelcome stuff – but when the pandemic hit it was the law of unintended consequences and out popped the solution we’d spent so much time campaigning for.
“It was so blindingly obvious all along this was the way to go and in the end we all got there in a way no one would have expected.
“How long would we have had to keep going otherwise? Who knows?
We were listened to but that was it. There was never a sense the people who run our organisation were backing us in our pursuit of a split season.”
The CPA was launched in early 2017 at the Ballyboden St Enda’s club. The group met immediate resistance and was denied official recognition.
A key figure in the Rule 42 debate in the 2000s, Kenoy said: “From day one this was always about fixing the fixtures and I’ll tell you exactly what prompted me to get involved.
“I was chairman of Kilmore in 2016 when we won the Roscommon intermediate football championship after a replay that went to extra-time. “We asked for a postponement of our Connacht club championship game the next day but were refused so we left our dressing-rooms in Strokestown at 4.30pm on the Saturday after winning the replay and had to be in another dressing room in Tuam the following midday.
“We’d also had a bereavement in the club but were flatly refused the postponement. As a result, I joined the CPA the minute it was formed. That was one of the examples of the horrendous way club players were treated.”
Kenoy feels the new model, wrapping up inter-county activity by July for club championships to kick in, will go down as an historic development.
He said: “I think John Horan’s (inset) big ambition was to bring in the second tier football championship but I believe he may now be remembered as the president who oversaw the split season. I think he’ll be remembered very kindly for that act alone.”