OH, FOR A TRUMP CARD
Getting Congress to embrace his Super 8 proposal, will allow Duffy to inch closer to real reform
PáRAIC DUFFY, you suspect, has occasions when he fantasises about summoning his inner Donald Trump. You can feign shock if you want at the very thought that beneath the considered and mildmannered exterior of the GAA director general, there is a raging despot paying rent, if you so wish.
But in Duffy’s case, the surprise would be if there wasn’t one.
He is in his ninth year as the GAA’s top official and, in that time, he has been a driving force in seeking to address player burnout, delivered a paper on under-the-counter payments to managers/coaches and, last year, pushed to introduce a calendar year fixture schedule, but has met resistance around every corner.
He is back again next weekend with a radical overhaul of the All-Ireland Football Championship which will also facilitate a condensed inter-county season – a blueprint that has been accepted by Central Council, but will either live or die by the will of Congress.
Ah, Congress. You won’t truly appreciate the gift that is democracy until you see it at play; a body whose innate resistance to change is legislated for by the demand that it takes a two-thirds weighted majority to get the business, any business, done.
They are hoping to change that once more this time with a couple of motions on next weekend’s agenda to either eliminate or reduce the weighted majority, but, deliciously, that will require two-thirds of the vote to get approval.
With the memory of last year fresh in his mind when four separate proposals to address fixture reform all comfortably achieved majority support but fell shy of that two-thirds bar, it would hardly be challenging for Duffy to tease out his inner Donald.
What he would not give to pull out a leather-bound folder and scratch his name furiously in front of a battery of photographers before declaring that his executive order to reform the Championship would simply be ‘fabulous’.
Thing is, though, Championship reform does not lend itself to the notion of ‘fabulous’, but rather to varying degrees of flawed thinking.
Duffy’s proposal, although high on innovation, is no different.
If you want to go pick a flaw in it, why restrict yourself to just one?
There is the perverse change of rhythm — we can’t think of another mainstream competition where sudden death competition feeds into the more forgiving environment of the Super 8 mini-leagues which are proposed to replace the All-Ireland quarter-final round.
It is hard to shake the feeling that you have just saddled the cart rather than the horse, but you only have to see how the opening rounds of the League have set the pulses racing and turnstiles clicking to know that there is a demand out there to see the top teams play each other more often.
There is also the real threat of ‘dead rubbers’ infecting the Super 8 phase. However, such has been the impoverished state of the All-Ireland series in recent times that, as it stands, we get on average at least one mismatch – which is a blood relation to a dead rubber anyhow – at the quarter-final round every year.
And, yes, it is a structure which facilitates the elite and offers little for the disenfranchised, but the primary function of any Championship format should not be to serve as a crutch for the weak, but instead it should seek to serve the game best by ensuring it is fit for purpose to stress test the claims of those who seek to be its champion.
Anyhow, those who bellyache about inequality should realise the only change in format that will ensure more teams are engaged in a competitive All-Ireland series will only come with the introduction of a second-tier Championship.
We had that conversation 12 months ago, but pride and prejudice – playing in an intermediate competition which bears little stigma at club level is apparently an acceptance of second class citizenship at inter-county level – rather that good sense ruled the day.
The prize on offer next weekend extends beyond a tweaked championship format, condensing an intercounty season that is far too protracted for its own good by three weeks.
That would ensure replays would become almost a thing of the past, the ratio of training to games at intercounty level would be reduced and, most significantly, it would provide an enhanced window for the playing of club fixtures.
This proposal comes against the backdrop of the birth of the Club Players’ Association which was conceived in a large part by the repeated failure of Congress to heed the pleas of its playing membership time and again in the past.
Despite the CPA leadership’s oppo- sition to the proposal – motivated in the main because of a lack of input – it feeds into the principle of what they seek to achieve in their campaign to ‘fix the fixtures’.
It creates not just a pathway for a better balanced fixture programme, but could also provide a window to show what the All-Ireland’s series could look like in the future if it ever managed to unshackle itself from the provincial system’s deathgrip.
It lays down an important premise by showing you can have more games over a shorter period of time.
For those who crib that they will not benefit, well they could if they had the conviction to push for an expanded All-Ireland series in the future to replace the increasingly irrelevant and imbalanced provincial Championships.
But for now, this represents the possibility of a step forward.
And as Duffy is likely to tell you, in GAA politics any time you are inching forward, you are winning.
This might just be the most significant inch of all.
There is a real demand out there to see the top teams play each other more often