POWER OF THE PARISH ‘NOBODY CAN SAY THAT THE SITUATION IS GOOD FOR CLUB OR COUNTY’
Corofin legend Fitzgerald believes that clubs can still have the opportunity to thrive within a revised GAA calendar
KIERAN FITZGERALD first played senior club football in 1998. He played his last club match in January of this year. In the 22 years in between, sporting empires emerged and then crumbled. Rules changed. Formats did, too. Training methods were overhauled. Science became central to the sporting curriculum.
Through it all, the GAA maintained the belief that the club was the foundation element of the entire association, the irreducible particle on which everything else is built.
Fitzgerald is now on the executive of a body whose very existence challenges that claim.
The Club Players’ Association shouldn’t be needed. That it is, and that it has attracted a membership in excess of 25,000, reflects the frustration among club players at the state of their game now.
Fitzgerald announced his retirement from a remarkable playing career in April; within two months he was on the CPA executive.
He brings vast experience from over two decades as a footballer with Corofin, in the course of which he won four All-Ireland titles, including a three in a row; 14 Galway championships, and seven Connacht titles.
He also made time for a decade with Galway, winning an All-Ireland in his debut season in 2001, as well as an All Star.
That inter-county experience equips Fitzgerald with an important perspective for his new role, because the squeeze on clubs is a direct consequence of the growing demands of the inter-county game.
Some find juxtaposing club and county uncomfortable, but it’s an inescapable fact.
The popularity of inter-county Gaelic games is one of the truths of Irish life, but the increasing workloads placed on players has had a direct, negative influence on clubs.
Finding a way for the two spheres to co-exist has become one of the consuming issues at many levels in the GAA. But the hope that the circumstances created by Covid-19 might lead to a longer-term realignment of the GAA calendar didn’t last long.
‘Looking for change, somebody is going to have to give up something,’ says Fitzgerald.
‘Whatever that may be, there will have to be concessions.
‘From a player’s point of view: I finished up in January and had played inter-county for a number of years as well. And all you want to do is play football.
‘That’s the way I was, I just wanted to play. I wanted to be told where I was meant to be and what I was meant to do, and leave the sorting out elsewhere.
‘I remember on a few occasions having to tell club managers I was with the county, and all that kind of stuff is just stress. It’s just hassle on players.
‘With a defined club season and a defined inter-county season, it takes all that stuff away. You won’t have any clashes.’ Certainty is the dream for the CPA. They want reliable dates for when seasons start and end, for both the club and inter-county games.
The GAA established a taskforce to review the fixtures’ calendar, but the CPA withdrew from it in frustration last November.
The taskforce subsequently issued its recommendations as well as a number of alternative plans for the intercounty season. Lockdown put a stop to any chance of progressing plans for change, though. The determination of the GAA to play championships this year if at all possible saw tight but exciting schedules confirmed two weeks ago.
Within days, though, the dreary old problems inevitably recurred. Reports of players being told to stay away from their clubs by inter-county managers proliferated, despite no county training being allowed before September 14.
If that prompted the GAA leadership to warn of sanctions a week after outlining a position of nonintervention, few who know the nature of the problem expect it to be a solution.
Long-term, structural reform of the GAA season is the most persuasive solution. ‘It’s got progressively worse as the inter-county scene has got more and more popular,’ says Kieran Fitzgerald.
‘And the inter-county scene is the cash cow and the promotional tool and that has been taking precedence.
‘Inter-county managers have been getting more and more influence and can dictate a lot more, or have been able to dictate a lot more in regard to the club championship.
‘The irregular games, the calendar, not knowing when you’re playing: that’s the reality of it. Trying to organise family life and social life and work life: a lot of players don’t work your regular 9 to 5, Monday to Friday job now. They work all hours, every day of the week. And trying to organise stuff is stressful.
‘We’ve been lucky enough with Corofin, but if you’re not involved with a successful or well-organised club, you could throw your hat at it and say, “I don’t need this hassle, I can just go to the gym and play a bit of astroturf”.’
It was reported on Friday that the GAA were yet to receive a complaint from clubs about a breach in the timetable by inter-county teams.
Everyone may be on their best behaviour given the controversy over breaches has been so recent. Alternatively, clubs may be reluctant to complain to their county board for fear of drawing unwanted attention on themselves.
After all, in some counties the aim of the board is supporting an inter-county manager in his attempts to win honours, be that at provincial or All-Ireland level.
And it would be understandable if a disgruntled club was reluctant to cast itself as the one that obstructed the county’s drive for glory.
This points up a further
‘FOR CHANGE, SOMEBODY IS GOING TO HAVE TO GIVE UP SOMETHING’
complication: asking county boards to police their own managers. But it is ridiculous to expect officials in Croke Park to correct the homework of every county.
Enforcement is, then, a big issue – but one that stems from the wider structural defects that have seen power tilt so markedly towards the inter-county game.
‘Drop out is huge,’ Fitzgerald reveals. ‘Even for ourselves (at Corofin), fringe players on our squad, you lose three or four every year. In a less successful or wellorganised club, you can see how players might say, “It’s just not worth it”.
‘The stuff you’ve heard (about frustration with fixtures and lack of games) is the stuff that’s turning players off playing club football.
‘Every club footballer is an inter-county supporter; they want to see their county do well. The influence of managers dictating the club calendar has become a huge problem.
‘The pressure county boards are under to try and accommodate the inter-county squad is effecting the clubs. That’s the reality of it for the last few years.
‘I hear it in my own dressing room: “When is there a game? If there’s a game, is it going to happen? If Galway win a Connacht semi-final there won’t be a game and if they lose, there will be”.
‘All that uncertainty, and then life has to go on outside of that with work.
‘The goodwill of club players has been pushed to its limit.
‘It’s coming to a head now. They’re asking for change.
‘I see it from being involved with the CPA: people want a more structured calendar, a defined season and they want the club scene given the time and the respect it deserves.
‘And that doesn’t have to come to the detriment of the inter-county season. Obviously the inter-county season deserves a big chunk of the year, but both can be accommodated.’
He is adamant about this, and he has a long, distinguished career to inform that view.
In the decade he spent with Galway, he lived the increase in demands made on inter-county players. He started out an All-Ireland winner and 10 years later, even as Galway declined as a force and became one more part of the pack, the requirements of training left room for little else in his week.
‘My last year, the hours we were putting in, it was a six-day week. You were doing something every night and there was no opportunity to be with your club.
‘That was just the way it is. It hasn’t changed since then.’
A man can’t live the kind of career Fitzgerald did without a sound attitude, and he thinks the intervention last weekend of GAA president John Horan, and director general, Tom Ryan, will have an effect.
More than that, he believes in change, in a restructured season in which club players know what they are training for and when they will play matches, and in which the inter-county game remains the thrilling spectacle that beguiles millions.
‘I know in our club, we have all our boys training and they are loving it. They are very focused on their club championship.
‘Down the road, this can give intercounty managers more scope when it comes to reviewing their players and seeing what they have.
‘I know As v Bs and training games are great, but going to watch club players in championship, it can benefit them.
‘The clubs will have their inter-county players and it gives the inter-county managers more of a chance to review players and maybe find new ones.
Players just want to play football and avoid getting embroiled in, “Where’s AN Other tonight? He’s with his county. Well he shouldn’t be”, that kind of crap,’ he says, distilling down the needs of players.
‘I have no doubt it can be done if the will is there to do it. Nobody in this day and age can say the current situation is good for any club or county.
‘Down through the years, the more it’s been tinkered with, the worse it seems to have got. The April month (reserved for club action) became a bit of a farce in the end.
‘Another problem is that every county board has different views on it, and every county does things differently. A bit of uniformity in the way counties approach their championships would be great.’
Kieran Fitzgerald announced his retirement by way of a statement released to the Tuam Herald. It included generous tribute to the people that helped him through a career that started 30 years ago, when he was a small child in one of those Galway parishes where a football is a small white sun around which everything else orbits.
He concluded it with the following paragraph: ‘Finally, the GAA is my identity and it’s embedded in my DNA. I look forward to repaying the faith that Corofin GAA Club invested in me over the years, and in whatever way I can assist the next generation in making their dreams become a reality too, I will.’
It was in that spirit that he agreed to join the executive of the Club Players’ Association, when it would have been as easy to let the opportunity pass.
That isn’t his way, because he understands the good that GAA clubs do. He has lived it most of his life.
And, like many others, he is convinced they can thrive within a revised GAA calendar.
They must.