CLIFFORD: GAA TAKE THE BORIS ROUTE

‘Super’ solution looks dead in the water as GAA, like Boris, focus on package instead of substance

‘IF YOU WANT TO DAMAGE THE SUPER 8s, THIS IS WHAT YOU DO’

IN A week when the fibber with a kipper became the British Prime minister, there are lessons for everyone to absorb. Mind, they will be hard learned here and over there. The low or high point, which depends whether you viewed the recent Conservative leadership race as an exercise in democracy or a night out at the comedy club, was surely when Boris Johnson distilled the argument on the single biggest economic and social issue that faces his people in well over half a century down to the state of how a dead fish was packaged.

He waved the sealed plastic that encased the unfortunate and unnamed member of the British haddock community as an example of how European regulations were piling on expense to processors while also damaging the environment.

It turned out that it had nothing to do with Europe, but was a regulation imposed by the autonomous UK Food Standards Service.

In more enlightened times that would have been enough for Johnson’s leadership ambitions to have also been encased in an ice pillow and sent packing. But his day of reckoning will come – albeit at a cost to his country – and that has already become evident even before he took up office as signs of what intelligent life was left in the Tories sought to flee the madness.

One resigning minister this week advised that he could not work under Johnson because of his inability to grasp detail and his instinct to govern by the ‘seat of his pants.’ And that is the bottom line in governance: without the detail there is no bigger picture no concept that can be delivered, no policy change that can be enacted in a sustainable manner.

That core truth penetrates all the way from high government down to the local Tidy Towns committee. If there is no attention to detail all you are left with are words blowing in the wind.

That truth also has never been more relevant to the GAA, who have been keen to deliver the impression of change but not always the attention to detail needed to ensure that any proposed change is sustainable.

Next weekend is an obvious example as Gaelic football’s Super 8s will wind up with a whimper.

On Sunday, traditionally the GAA’s favoured day to host its headline fixture, we will see a dead rubber between Cork and Roscommon and a close blood relation to one in Omagh, where the only prize on offer is hardly one at all as Dublin and Tyrone jostle for the right to play Kerry, Donegal or Mayo.

Of course given the format, the prospect of dead rubbers was always a given but it takes some curious thinking to fix two games of such little importance on a prime time slot at the series’ conclusion,

when they had the option of concluding Group 1 with the tantalising winner-takes-all Mayo and Donegal game topping the bill.

Instead they have gone and asked Bruce Springsteen to play support to Crystal Swing. All of this, of course, could have been avoided if the CCCC waited until the second round of fixtures had been concluded and permutations known, before deciding who played on the Saturday evening slot and who got to bring the curtain down.

You may see that as a small detail, but is one which will colour public perceptions of what many already view as a flawed concept, with all the intrigue that next weekend offers concluded by Saturday evening.

There is a reason the third place play-off is played before rather than after the World Cup final.

Put it this way, if you wanted to damage the Super 8s, which are set for review after next year, this is exactly what you would do.

But there is an added curiosity about the perverse cart-beforehorse scheduling of the final round of the Super 8s given that Sky TV will show the Mayo/Donegal and Kerry/Meath games where qualification is alive in both.

Perhaps that is the reason why the CCCC did not wait until after the final round permutations became known, allowing Sky to exercise an option to pick a favoured game, given that from some way off Group 1 always seemed more likely to provide the final round intrigue.

If that was the case it should enrage us, not so much because it will be hidden behind a subscription wall, but if the detail of a broadcasting contract supersedes the attention to detail which the GAA needed to lavish on a Championship format on trial while in its care, then we are in a pitiful place.

However, Croke Park have denied this week that the scheduling of the final round was determined by its broadcasting rights commitments. But if that is really the case, why did the CCCC sacrifice the competitive integrity of the Super 8s series by fixing two games of so little importance as its closing act.

Croke Park’s explanation that the eight counties and their supporters wanted to know almost three weeks in advance as to whether they were playing on a Saturday evening or a Sunday afternoon is light on credibility, especially in a Championship where counties have been given less than a week to know their next opponents and venue.

Whatever way you look at this, it amounts to an appalling lack of foresight to undermine what is an attempt to reform an ailing Championship by bringing the curtains down with an afternoon of fixtures where we can’t be certain anyone will be bothered by losing. But then when the need to deliver on detail is screaming in their face, there have been too many times when the GAA leadership has been unable to see it.

The need to move the last eight round out of Croke Park long preceded the Super 8s, as the games bled such atmosphere they were turned into a bird sanctuary. And, of course, when they could not even absorb the detail which sought, on the back of Donegal’s motion this year, to limit Dublin to one home game in the Super 8s to facilitate fairness, then there really should be nothing left to surprise us.

Sadly, there is. A central funding system, which despite some reform, is still lop-sided in Dublin’s favour remains, while the refusal to even question the champions’ access to the national stadium despite declining attendance figures in the National League has left the GAA blind to the huge advantage which that confers are other examples.

And there is even more to come. The decision to set up a GAA Calendars Fixture Review task force is to be welcomed.

Less so is GAA president John Horan’s insistence on hoisting a two-tiered Championship format on them, rather than deferring it to allow the group the blank canvas it needs to come up with a new way.

But in the pursuit of legacy, detail tends to be as valued as a dead fish in the hands of a man howling at the moon.