KICKING PROBLEMS DOWN THE ROAD
A bite-size inter-county schedule is still ignoring disgruntled club players
‘THINKING THE IMBALANCE WOULD BE REDRESSED LOOKS NAIVE’
ALONG with a compressed GAA season comes a compacted version of the problems the organisation has struggled to answer for years now. There is already great excitement in anticipating an old-school football Championship. The competition has been baggy for years, suffering from weeks of often tedious preamble before the season splutters into animation for a couple of weeks in late summer.
The hurling competition will be diminished by the absence of roundrobin competitions in Leinster and especially in Munster, with the new format of the past two years providing tremendous excitement.
Nonetheless, given that the president of the GAA could, as recently as the second week of May, fear for any season at all, the novelty of breakneck rushes through November and December, with the Sam Maguire handed over six days before Christmas, will thrill millions.
But the enormous difficulties created by the growth of the intercounty game have not been crushed by a bite-sized schedule.
Instead, the admirable desire of the GAA to facilitate clubs has, in fact, highlighted anew the disproportionate power wielded by intercounty managers.
County boards afraid or unable to insist on their unit abiding by the protocols from head office, which aimed to see no inter-county training resume until September 14 and the preceding weeks devoted to club fare, are rushing through their competitions so managers can have as much access to players as possible.
This was inevitable but it is no less wearying for that. The sense of solidarity that truly did exist in this country over the past three months, and which sustained efforts to suppress the spread of Covid-19, did not survive first contact with the modern inter-county set-up.
It was inevitable, too, that the GAA leadership would choose not to actively pursue counties who are breaching its guidelines.
Identifying rule breakers has long been a difficulty for the authorities, but in this instance the challenge is exacerbated by the sheer scale of the inter-county game now.
Tom Ryan, the GAA’s director general, identified this problem robustly in his annual report issued earlier this year.
On Friday, he rather sweetly sought to rely on the virtues of the GAA community in respecting the plan for unfurling this season under emergency measures.
‘The reason we’re at the stage we’re at is because the country as a whole and the association has showed a great degree of restraint and personal responsibility,’ said Ryan, later adding, ‘it hasn’t been a summer for penalties and for sanctions and I’m not really sure that’s the right realm for this thing either’.
He did say that ‘if there’s a second stage required in terms of sanctions and penalties and so on, yeah of course we’ll look at that. But that’s not one for today’.
It won’t be for any day soon, either, one suspects.
A proposal by the Club Players Association to introduce a rule change that would make the weeks from July 1 to September 14 a mandatory closed period for intercounty preparation, breaches of which would see the offending counties barred from competitions this year, was bold but doomed.
The appetite for running off shortened seasons in a climate where the GAA will lose tens of millions and also try and tackle decisively the rampant power of inter-county managers does not seem extensive.
This problem is not going to dissolve easily, though, and the enormous preparation costs for county teams that prompted Ryan’s sharp comments in his annual report, are only serving to feed the beast.
Those who wondered if this extraordinary year presented an opportunity to finally redress the imbalance that threatens to distort the GAA beyond correction, now look hopelessly naive.
And as soon as the county game resumes in mid-October, the pattern of a conventional season will be followed: the concerns of the thousands of club players will be forgotten as a rollicking seven weeks of drama await.
It could be thrilling, too, but as is now required in any examination of life in the weeks and months ahead, the lurking threat posed by Covid19 must be considered.
The gravest manifestation would come in a second surge, but without one its effects will still be significant.
Social distancing will obtain for months to come in all aspects of our lives, and even if it is reduced to one metre it will have a significant effect on attendances, but also on how match-days are organised and then managed.
The idea of tens of thousands spilling onto Jones’s Road and into Drumcondra and Ballybough after a football final on December 19, the masses mingling with Christmas shoppers and those 12 pubs nuisances, has a fascinating culture clash tingle to it.
But how viable or advisable or favourable a notion is that? It is easy in late June, with decent weather and long evenings and a largely suppressed virus, to think that more and more of our old way of doing things can be salvaged from the maw of the pandemic.
But that is to figure without the public health requirements that we are obliged to make part of our new routines, let alone the dreaded prospect of a resurgence.
If mitigating unnecessary risk is the goal, then even a half-full Croke Park for All-Ireland final days look an improbable aim.
The GAA have understandably and – in this view, correctly – resisted the concept of playing games behind closed doors so far.
This is a community organisation, not a professional one, and it is grim indeed to consider the two biggest days of the Irish sporting year played out in an echoing ground while fans are obliged to watch on from home.
As long as the virus remains a controlled risk, some accommodation that sees supporters at venues looks plausible, but the burden of respon
sibility on organisers and stewards will be great.
After all that, there is the sport to consider and this is where this strange, travel-size season stirs the deepest excitement.
Even if, as the gossip and the street wisdom suggests, every selfrespecting county team has been preparing furtively for some time now, the demands of reversion to old championship formats present new challenges for managers and coaches.
Hopes of catching Dublin or Kerry or Limerick or Tipp on an off-day come with varying degrees of conviction; it remains practically impossible, for instance, to see Dublin caught by anyone in Leinster.
However, the Munster Hurling Championship will be fraught and fascinating, while its football draw pitches Cork and Kerry into combat on November 7 or 8. Is it absurd to anticipate Ronan McCarthy’s energetic renovation project resulting in a shock defeat for Kerry in the half-dark of a Cork evening, the floodlights illuminating Páirc Uí Chaoimh for miles around?
Galway’s rebuild, Mayo’s flagging quest, an Ulster Championship collision between Donegal and Tyrone blazing like a late-lit bonfire: considering the potential in all these stories brings a bracing reminder of why the championships thrill so many year after year.
It is one of the enduring strengths of the GAA, but the power of the football and hurling competitions also ensures that deeper problems are forgotten once the big games start rolling.
And they will come clattering hard and fast, weekend after weekend, at a time when the deathless end-ofyear filler is usually getting its final touches.
And on those hectic Saturdays and Sundays, the issues of the clubs and their frustrated players and the rotten way many will have been treated, will not be recalled.
But nor will they go away – not even when the season is shortened and repackaged and anticipated like a visit from Santa Claus.