WIT, WISDOM AND A WITHERING EDGE
Time for Croke Park to put manners on an out-of-control college game...
IT is should be a source of regret that instead of Rounders the GAA didn’t opt for rowing as its fourth official game.
Had they done so it might have well scratched its itch to ape colonial ways which demands, no matter at what cost, the playing of hurling and football in elite seats of learnings has to be promoted and protected even when in defiance of player welfare.
Now, had the GAA its own take on the Boat Race — a Curragh or Seine boat replacing the standard British version and a ban on both the wearing of straw-boat hats and the ingestion of Pimms — folk might have been able to make peace with the idea.
And, who knows, if UCC, NUIG, UCD and all the rest got their GAA competitive kicks out of a regatta, the good folk of Inniskeen might today have grabbed an eyeful of David Clifford.
The fact he is hamstrung has highlighted the madness that is playing Higher Education Championships in the middle of the Allianz League; the Kerry star having togged in three games inside seven days with inevitable consequences.
But while Clifford’s injury grabbed the headlines, he was only in the ha’penny place when compared to others.
The horror stories have flowed quick and fast this week, pride of place going to Clare footballer Ciaran Russell, who played four Championship games — two rounds of Fitzgibbon and Sigerson Cup with An Garda — and two League games with the Banner inside two weeks.
The blame for this is shared between both county and college management teams, but ultimately it lies at Croke Park’s door; serving as a reminder of its repeated failure to put manners on an out of control Higher Education sector.
Three years ago we saw Sligo IT and Queens kicked out of the Sigerson Cup and reinstated on appeal for fielding eligible players, ditto IT Carlow in the same year’s Fitzgibbon Cup as a defeated Mary I team went down the DRA route. It is quite the indictment of the Irish education system that it is those who make it to the very top of the schooling pyramid who appear to be slowest in the uptake when it comes to reading the rule book. But, perhaps, that is because they only understand it too well. If that is the case, it would be in keeping with how they have played fast and loose with the notion of fair play. Stories of money washing around the college game have been out there for an age. Then, of course, there were those serial students whose college and course hopping was either down to an admirable thirst for knowledge or for the fringe benefits that came with playing higher education Championships.
A rule change some years ago sought to put a halt to that, but it was also an admission that morality and sportsmanship were foreign concepts to the college game.
And yet despite its lack of scruples it has remained untouched.
At the end of this month, they will play their finals with two Championship games inside 24 hours and there will not be a whisper of protest even though this is in breach of anything we know about player welfare best practise.
But here’s the rub, while these Championships remain the newly formed Under 20 Championship has had its status diluted — players on senior county panels will not be able to take part — and has been jettisoned into the middle of the summer when GAA fans will have their attentions diverted to weightier matters.
The now defunct Under 21 football Championship mattered; days like the one in Limerick when Westmeath lowered Kerry in 1999, or even when Cavan went on that four in a row winning streak in Ulster — lit up whole counties.
This was a Championship that had huge traction with the GAA public and yet it was offered up as a sacrificial offering to appease burn-out concerns while the HE Championships — which have far bigger questions to answer on the subject — avoided all reform, including a pre-Christmas slot in the GAA calendar.
That would have clashed with exams, they say. Tough.
Had the under-20 Championship slotted straight into the fixture schedule occupied by the grade it replaced, the likes of Clifford would not have been asked to serve two masters. We know that because Eamonn Fitzmaurice released his under-21 players last year in the knowledge it was a competition that meant something.
That sense of purpose will never extend to a shared journey between county and college, although that does not excuse the Kerry manager’s disregard for Clifford’s welfare last weekend.
The argument will be made that the Higher Education champion-
ships allow players to develop but we live in an age where counties now develop their own.
There will also be the cry that players benefit from college scholarships to play GAA, but should the price for that see players flogged to within an inch of the end of their careers?
Here’s a suggestion and it is one that can be accommodated within the GAA’s current player welfare expenditure.
In its last deal with the GPA, 1.2 million euros was set aside annually for nutritional expenses but that money would be better spent if it was pooled into a central college bursary fund for the game’s top young hurlers and footballers rather than refunding inter-county players for their high-energy bars.
That would allow a generous 10,000 euros a year bursary for 120 elite top players, who would no longer be pawns in a college game where the glory is not easily found.