Covid cloud had a silver lining for the CPA
‘We wouldn’t have got a split season within the next 10 years,’ says Briody
IN THE not too distant future, they won’t believe that a thing like a phone book existed. In the era of data protection, it’ll seem unthinkable that everyone’s name, address and a way to contact them in the heart of their home was published in a book that was available to just about anyone, anywhere.
And not long down the line, there will be a cohort of GAA club players who will approach their season with near certainty in terms of how it will all pan out.
The notion that you could leave the country for the summer and not miss a beat will seem alien. They won’t believe that there was a time when fixtures, out of necessity, were made on the hoof, where a game or an entire championship could be held hostage to a replay here or a change of plan there. At a given point in time, any game could be either two weeks or two months away.
For many counties and players, the traditional builders’ holidays were the only refuge of certainty. A twoweek window when there would be no games would spark a scramble to fit a summer’s worth of social events into a fortnight before it was back to the uncertainty.
Change
That has changed now. The split season is the way forward for the GAA. Thanks to a combination of hard lobbying from the Club Players’ Association (CPA), a group that morphed and rolled with the punches as the need required, and an unlikely ally in the form of the pandemic, the GAA landscape has shifted dramatically.
Last week, the CPA declared ‘mission accomplished’ and disbanded. With almost half the year signed over to the clubs, there was nowhere left to go.
After years of working inside and outside the tent, going both through and around official channels, their work is done. The pandemic forced the GAA into a different type of season in 2020 and it gathered such momentum that the calendar has undergone seismic change.
It was a win for the CPA and one that came about much sooner than anyone expected. But no one connected to the group is in any doubt that without the pandemic, their battle to ‘fix the fixtures’ would have been a much longer one.
“We’d be 10 years away from a split season,” said now former CPA chairman Micheál Briody when asked where the group would be without Covid-19.
“We are under no illusions that we wouldn’t have got a split season within the next 10 years.
“We felt there could have been improvements along the way. But we wouldn’t in our wildest dreams have thought we’d have gotten as far in such a short space of time. I think it would have happened incrementally.”
For such a dramatic change, and for an organisation often accused of being slow to move on, the motion passed with little fuss at Congress. What had started as Monaghan man Declan Brennan’s idea, where he sought to improve the lot of club players, something significant had been brought about.
Within a couple of months of its official launch, the CPA had 20,000 members. By the time it was wrapped up, that had swollen to 26,000. They could have looked for more, but as Briody puts it: “It was either spend time trying to get change or spend time trying to get members.”
It was far from straightforward. The
It was a win for the CPA and one that came about much sooner than anyone expected
CPA had seen a motion they brought around transparency hammered at Congress. They had walked out on committees. And when they felt the need to go on a war footing and be unpopular within Croke Park, they weren’t shy about that either.
Their media releases were often embargoed until the following day to try to ensure their message was heard.
As Liam Griffin put it last week: “I didn’t get too many hugs and kisses when they were going about the place, I’ll give you that.”
Griffin also pointed out that the people they were rutting with were all out for the same thing – a better GAA. They just had different ideas of what that might look like.
And last week, with their work done, they stepped away. There was talk they could remain together in some capacity but they opted against it.
“We debated it,” Briody said. “But we said we’d be sitting around for two years with no real agenda. And I think ultimately it’s the responsibility of Croke Park and county boards to look after clubs.”
Theirs was a brief history. But they undoubtedly left their mark.