Don’t blame players, county boards must learn to say no to managers

ONCE UPON A TIME, accusations that the acronym GAA stood for Grab All Association were aimed at well-fed committee men squeezed into shirts and ties. The targets of slurs about greed are altogether sleeker nowadays. Since the advent of the GPA, players are now the fall guys when jibes about an obsession with money are in flight.

Money is, ostensibly, at the heart of this current eruption by the players’ body, as they demand full recompense for their members, no matter how unfair or absurd the demands made on their time by county managers.

And it suits certain agendas for money to be identified as the crux of the matter. This, though, is really about addressing a culture distorted to an increasingly grotesque extent by the rampant control demanded by managers – and no matter how unreasonable the power-grab, this is invariably facilitated by weak county boards.

The power vested in inter-county managers would, were it not for the pandemic, have threatened the viability of the club game, and looked certain to sunder the association into at least two parts at some point, with the elite, inter-county end of the organisation breaking free.

A split-season model will not prove the solution to all of the GAA’s problems, but it at least provides defined windows for both the club and county games.

Its introduction was a dramatic response to a long-standing and pervasive problem, and it showed the ability of a huge organisation, trying to fulfil the needs of a vast number of sometimes competing constituencies, to react with agility and decisiveness.

Now it must do so again, but not in facing down a players’ organisation that may not have a compelling argument on its side, but which is obviously not the problem that should be consuming the thoughts of administrators in Croke Park, either.

The requirement, rather, is to tackle the power of managers, and the wider issues springing from it: large numbers of support staff, many of whom are getting paid (and with no limit on the number of sessions they can include on the invoice), pressure on players to devote unhealthy amounts of time and energy to the games, and the asphyxiating financial pressure brought to bear on county executives to fund the entire show.

Tom Ryan, the director general of the GAA, highlighted in his 2020 annual report that preparation costs for 2019 reached almost €30million.

This, he said, was not sustainable, an observation that seemed objectively sound. Yet it drew a furious reaction from the GPA, one that must rank as one of the most ill-considered and tone-deaf ever to issue to from a body that has some form in misreading the room.

‘It is disappointing for our members, that the inter-county game to which they dedicate 31 hours of their time each week, as they proudly represent their counties, is once again being presented as the GAA’s problem child,’ it said, with prim fury.

That players were expected to devote up to 31 hours a week to county panels was, of course, exposed as a critical issue in a 2018 ESRI report.

It was a statistic that frazzled the mind, indicative of how out-ofcontrol demands on players had become. Yet, two years later, it was being used to fortify the GPA’s position against an imagined attack by the most senior official in the

GAA. Then, as now, the problem was the control devolved to managers. And the GPA – under new leadership since that tantrum in 2020, it should be noted – should not be expected to correct an entire culture on its own.

Demanding full reimbursement of expenses for every session is not realistic, either, but this is an impasse that is only symptomatic of a much deeper malady.

The players cannot correct that on their own. The onus to do so is not on them at all. If managers are to have their power curtailed, it must be done by officials – but this presents an immediate, and potentially intractable, problem.

The will to tell a manager that he cannot have unlimited access to players, their time, or funds to support their ambitions, cannot feasibly come from Croke Park.

Instead, it is up to individual counties to make that case, and the inability of too many county board officials to say no is what has caused this mess in the first place.

Expecting them to lead the way in creating a new culture is a hopeless wish. But pinning it all on the players is unfair and unrealistic.

TIME PRESSURE: Louth players are put through their paces at a training session ■★IS name has not been mentioned often, but Peter Keane is entitled to some of the credit for Kerry’s current fine fettle. The manner in which his tenure ended last autumn spoke to the decisiveness of the Kerry board, but Keane was unhappy and made that plain. The failure to find a way around a dogged, disciplined Tyrone did for him in the end, but he left behind a hugely talented squad that, crucially, had improved its physical conditioning to an important extent. Tyrone are now Jack O’Connor’s problem, again.