GIVE US BACK OUR SUMMER

Condensed season a catastrophic act of self-sabotage

IT would be the rhetorical equivalent of one of those high-summer David Clifford or Con O’Callaghan or Aaron Gillane detonations of genius that bring a glow of wonder to Croke Park.

Jarlath Burns, the former Armagh captain who has made such a bright, sure-footed impression in the early days of his GAA presidency, speaking a few plain but seismic and game-changing words.

In our dream, Burns, a progressive, intelligent voice, seizes the initiative to announce: “The All-Ireland finals will return to September – and August will again burst with the kind of iconic fixtures that have been a thrilling way of life for decades.”

That the Association instead chooses to double down on their hugely misguided belief that the championship season should be shorter than The Sunday Game theme tune, that they insist on playing the All-Ireland finals while half the country is sunning itself in the Med, remains inexplicable to those of us raised on and in thrall to the enchantment of a GAA summer.

It is heartbreaking to look on helplessly as that magic dust – something dreamy and entrancing and fantastic to so many of us, the very essence of an Irish summer – is wilfully flushed down the sinkhole.

With every week that passes, the scale of the damage inflicted by the catastrophic act of self-sabotage that is the GAA’s ceding of its two traditional landmark months for inter-county football and hurling becomes more strikingly apparent.

Games squeezed like tinned sardines into a cramped calendar, marquee fixtures compelled to cower in the shadow of sell-out rugby fixtures, Premier League title run-ins or Rory McIlroy’s pursuit of a Green Jacket.

Early-round championship matches played on boggy pitches, the strikingly diminished attendances shivering on sparsely populated terraces.

Or to quote distinguished All-Ireland winner turned Offaly county board chairman Michael Duignan in an impassioned cry for change: “People are sick of going to inter-county games in the wind and rain wrapped up like Eskimos.”

RIVALRIES

The public are voting with their feet: Just 8,000 went to see Cavan’s famous victory over Monaghan last Sunday, half of what might ordinarily be expected for one of Gaelic football’s storied local rivalries. A colleague who attended Longford’s loss to Meath – a game that yielded six goals – could not remember such a tiny Pearse Park championship crowd.

Dublin play Meath today, and if that rivalry, once the most titanic in Gaelic Games, has been diminished by the All-Ireland champions’ dominance, the absurdist April scheduling means it is completely lost in the heavy sporting traffic generated by a weekend of Augusta, Aintree, Leinster v ROG at the Aviva and, Arsenal, Liverpool and Manchester City’s pursuit of glory.

April is not and never will be GAA country.

August and September – before rugby or the Premier League go into overdrive, with the kids in competing counties back in school to soak up the All-Ireland final atmosphere – are the months when the wider public buys into the GAA season, when it traditionally became the centre point of the national conversation.

How counter-productive then that the GAA displays the same absence of logic of a broadcaster who cancels all programming in prime time and instead puts up the test card when the potential audience is greatest.

As a consequence of the split season – an authentically noble idea, but deeply, maddeningly flawed in its execution – the GAA have pulled down the inter-county shutters just as the crowds converge outside their shop window.

Jim McGuinness, forever revered in Donegal for his messianic 2012 All-Ireland-winning miracle and now back at the Tír Chonaill tiller pursuing a blockbuster sequel to Jimmy’s winning matches, cannot get his head around the new reality.

“I spoke with Seán Boylan briefly after our game [with Meath] and we were talking about the shop window.

“The shop front that the GAA had, it feels like it has been lost to an extent and relinquished. I don’t see any positives there, really.”

Club players will counter that order has been brought to what was fixture chaos, that they are now guaranteed a reasonable programme of games in the best of the weather. There is a degree of truth in this, although the argument is undermined by the fact that some county championships continue to stretch into the dark, winter months.

Besides, counties such as Kilkenny prove that, with the right will, club and county competitions can blissfully co-habit.

The opportunity cost from sacrificing the mass market exposure that comes with having a largely free stage and firm August and September pitches is immense.

The GAA is not solely about players, though they are self-evidently vital to the theatre.

It is about the volunteers, it is about the people in towns and villages who put on their replica shirts and take to the byways of Ireland to follow their county.

The one group not represented by the GPA or the CPA or any of the other vocal lobbying groups is supporters: lifetime contributors to the coffers, the cultural and vocal lifeblood of the Association, the masses who traditionally brought spending power and a surge of colour to Thurles or Clones or Castlebar or Killarney on those carnival summer days.

McGuinness speaks with eloquence on the subject, distilling the charm of the championship day at a game down to its essence.

“Who are we serving? We should be serving the straw-hat brigade that live all year for the county, that want to go on a hot summer’s evening, get on a bus and have a drink and watch their county play in the height of summer.

“Brilliant football on a dry surface with a dry ball, a summer atmosphere, a balmy evening. That, for me, is what the championship is all about.”

ABUNDANCE

Games at this time of the year are stripped of that essential selling-point. The rush of fixtures, the league run-off in the blink of an eye, straight into championship without pausing to catch a breath, creates an abundance of issues.

Players, with little recovery time, are more vulnerable to injury. There is little time to market games, to build up excitement and interest, to create a sense of occasion. Big matches go head to head, the biggest names frequently hidden away.

As Jamison Gibson Park and Jurgen Klopp and the great Offalyman Shane Lowry dominate the headlines, these early championship weeks, with the wonderful stories they have to tell – like last weekend’s heartwarming, againstthe-odds victories for Wicklow and Waterford – are largely rendered invisible, lost in the fog.

What do sponsors, who invest vast sums to plant their name on the summer billboard, feel about this reduced interaction with the public?

That’s before we even get to potential Munster hurling championship collisions for the ages banished to the badlands of GAAGO, a prime weapon in the recruitment of the next generation effectively decommissioned.

This year, the All-Ireland hurling quarter-finals will take place on Saturday, June 22, with starting times of 1.15pm and 2.15pm. That’s right, 1.15pm on a Saturday, the crown jewels of summer effectively hidden in the back of a cupboard.

All-Ireland final weekends have traditionally been social as much as a sporting weekends, the tribes – led by former players – converging in Dublin town on the Saturday afternoon, enjoying a few pints and renewing acquaintanc

‘It’s turning a three-day Mardi Gras into a soulless day trip’

es in city centre watering holes.

It is a key part of the weekend’s pageantry, an uplifting celebration of something uniquely, beautifully Irish.

CASUALTY

But it is yet another casualty of the condensed calendar, All-Ireland finals in the height of the tourist season – with consequent exorbitant hotel prices and limited room availability – turning what used to be a three-day Mardi Gras into a soulless day-trip.

McGuinness concludes: “There are a lot of things that have changed and maybe not necessarily for the benefit of the Association or the optics. I don’t think it is healthy for players, management and supporters as well.”

As the flow of incredulity rises to a tidal wave, how healing would it be to hear the voice of leadership, for the forces of emotional intelligence to rise up and return to the GAA public a precious gift which should never have been taken away.

To reunite the prodigal sons of August and September with the family that misses them so much.