The GAA we return to is better than the one we left behind
Lockdown has shown split season is the way forward, clubs are revitalised and Championship is most eagerly awaited in years
THE momentary sense of alarm I felt this week served as yet another little reminder of how our world has flipped into the dark and surreal. Not bragging, but my 40-year-old body is still ticking over quite nicely.
I could count on one hand the amount of times I ever missed a game because of injury and I could tell you the exact time of the year I get a moderate dose of the sniffles, which mainly presents as a clogged nose and a dry, irritable sore throat.
The first full week back in school every time.
Even when I was at peak fitness in the run-up to All-Ireland finals, it would hit me and you might think – given the proximity to the biggest game of the season – it would have me fretting.
Never. I was so used to it that the very idea of presenting Jack O’Connor, Pat O’Shea or Éamonn Fitzmaurice with an absentee note for training would never even enter my head.
Which is just as well as the man who can’t train two weeks out from an All-Ireland final, because of a tickle in the throat, has no business being there.
I know why I keep getting these symptoms at this time of the year and many parents, whose children pick up bugs after starting school, will, I’m sure, agree.
It comes about after a summer of relative isolation, suddenly a room full of human beings all congregating at once for hours means that the air is full of little invisible bugs that prey on immune systems which are still only waking up.
At least that is my theory and therefore I hardly pay it any attention.
And, yet, this week when those old, familiar welcome-back-toschool symptoms presented, instead of being reassured that my body was keeping perfect time, all I could hear was a ticking bomb.
Straight away I was dialling the phone, in a matter of hours I was swabbed up the nose and down the throat – unpleasant but hardly in the chasing Bernard Brogan around Croke Park realm – and that was it.
The result was speedy – and yes negative – but there was enough time in between for rationality to unravel as I started recalling who might be deemed my close contacts, my family, friends, the mentors and players in the Listry club that I manage and, last but hardly least, the school.
It is part of the human condition that you think the worst, but it is no way to live as this past week’s events reminded me.
Life has to go on and another slice of normal living will come our way when our county players return to training this week.
It has been a long and sometimes lonely road since the inter-county game dropped off a cliff more than six months ago.
That is pretty much the last time I was on this page. I missed the game, watching it, managing it, writing about it and its absence, even though it was utterly unavoidable.
It made these the strangest and most challenging months for vast swathes of our society.
That is why getting the intercounty game back is so important, but, and this is living proof that a crisis is opportunity’s best friend, I am convinced the GAA we have returned to, is better than the one we left behind.
I would not have thought that in the early months in the lockdown, when the light was hard to see and fear, as ever, thrived in the dark.
Mind, the initial burst of energy carried me some way down the road.
At the start, hoodwinked into thinking that this might just be a temporary curse, we kept the training going remotely in Listry via Zoom with Tabata sessions, 30 lads on a computer screen in splendid isolation doing sit-ups and press-ups.
I got my kicks from Páidí watching from a great height and shaking his head at the very concept of virtual training.
But when it became evident that this was for the long haul, I gave the players a break and they needed it. It may be different for other athletes, but footballers are not long-distance runners who thrive on solitude. I found that myself. I started off the lockdown doing daily 5k circuit runs, but after a while the fire fizzled and the runners stayed in the gear bag.
That is the beauty of team sport, we feed off each other. When Listry returned to training, we had more players back – at one stage there were 40 – than we had pre-lockdown, such was the ravenous appetite for company and for sport.
It ended for us last weekend when we were beaten in the county quarter-final by Brosna, but I loved the run we had; partly because I doubted at one stage whether we would play any ball this year, but mainly because it was just the cut and thrust of going straight into championship.
And for all the challenges that the inter-county Championship faces, I don’t think we have ever needed one to happen as badly and I don’t think I have ever looked forward to one as much.
I just think it is teed-up so perfectly because thus far everything the GAA has touched has turned to gold.
From displaying, once more, its unrivalled volunteer network and ethos in the community – so evident and obvious in the early weeks of the lockdown – to how it has used this crisis to effectively heal itself.
That wearisome old question of club versus county that has sucked the energy out of players, supporters, managers and administrators for decades and whose resolution was deemed to be as complex as making Brexit work, has found a way to untangle itself without breaking international law or human will. The split-season model used as an emergency stop-gap is now the accepted way forward.
I would have one gripe. I believe that the condensed inter-county championship should have preceded the club game, given that if it was played when case levels were low there would be no threat to its completion.
The real prospect of localised lockdowns could wreak havoc with the championship over the winter months, whereas the club game, autonomous by nature in the absence of provincial and
‘PÁIDÍ MUST BE SHAKING HIS HEAD UP ABOVE AT THE CONCEPT OF VIRTUAL TRAINING’
All-Ireland elements, was better structured to deal with such interruptions.
But the split season has worked superbly, clubs thriving in having unfettered access to their best players and to a fixture calendar which is cemented in certainty.
On top of all that, after years when the GAA lamented the shallowness of the pool of broadcasters who could compete for its media rights, it found that there is a very eager market by going direct.
It may be a one-off, due to the lamentable absence of crowds, but
the move country-wide by counties streaming club games has been an outstanding success and, on top of games being shown on mainstream television, has opened up a whole new viewing world for true GAA fans.
In time, it may also allow the GAA to put a value on streaming intercounty games live, not just in a monetary sense, but also in terms of promotion directly to supporters.
All of this has been hugely positive, and in keeping with that there is no reason to believe that this winter’s Championship will stay true to the narrative that in adversity the GAA has discovered the very best of itself.
Of course, I am seeing this from the outside but I would be fascinated to get inside the head of a player who is returning to training with their county team this week.
I would imagine they are excited. They have experienced the strangest summer of their lives, but it has left them in a good place. They perhaps are not as fit as they would be in normal circumstances – and this is a reflection of the inhibited and controlled life of the modern player – because I would imagine that inter-county players were the only constituency in Irish society who can claim that they had a better social life this summer than would normally be the case.
I don’t blame them for that and my own guilty secret – and in truth greatest pleasure – was securing a keg of stout for my 40th birthday in the middle of the summer, setting it up in the garage and having a few members of my socially-distanced family around.
It is the small things in life you pine for in times like these, a few pints, a little company, a dollop of craic, and the value of all that in terms of mental health can never be underestimated.
Anyhow, I digress, but the point is that if players are returning with a little more body fat and a sliver less lung capacity, I believe that mentally they will be fresh, happy and enthusiastic in a way that would not be achievable in a regular treadmill season.
But I don’t believe that inferior conditioning will be an issue, with GPS-based systems there is simply no hiding place any more in terms of what amount of work players can do. So, physically, it is not a case that they are heading back into boot camp this week.
And they are coming back to something that is brand, shiny new. A sudden-death Championship is so foreign to the modern player.
They are so used to round-robins and loser rounds, not just at county level but in the club game too, it must send a sense of excitement through them.
I never got to experience that as an inter-county player and I am slightly envious of the Kerry lads who will head to Páirc Uí Chaoimh next month, knowing their season hangs on that game.
It’s the way it used to be and for all kinds of good reasons that changed but for the sheer thrill – and terror too – the idea of playing a game of that magnitude against your age-old rivals has to be a prospect that will motivate players.
True, playing behind closed doors or before radically reduced attendances will diminish the experience, but when the prize gets this big, players tend to play in a bubble.
The player who needs to be energised by an atmosphere is one who is not mentally tuned-in in the first instance.
So, yes we will not only have a Championship, but we will also have a very good one.
True, it will be different and a little surreal, but that is only because sport mirrors society.
The GAA has always been the looking glass that has reflected the very best of us and I am convinced the best is still to come.
It is great to be back.
‘IN ADVERSITY, THE GAA HAS FOUND THE VERY BEST OF ITSELF’