Pre-Christmas pre-season is lunacy

THERE’S a sort of a Kafkaesque logic to the thing. In seeking to condense the inter-county season the GAA has, if anything, managed to extend the bloody thing. December, you see, is the new January.

This year’s O’Bryne Cup got underway at the beginning of the month and continued last weekend. The final is scheduled for the weekend before the National League gets underway. Last year’s O’Byrne Cup final, by the way, was played in May because poor weather delayed fixtures in January. Lunacy pure and simple.

It’s almost as if that when putting together their new fixtures regime, Croke Park completely forgot about these pre-season competitions. There’s just no room for them any more so the O’Bryne Cup and the Munster Senior Hurling League have started to colonise a month that’s hardly if ever seen inter-county action before.

As oversights go it’s quite a big one. Or perhaps not. Perhaps this is just what they had in mind all along. If Croke Park had advocated the abolition of these pre-season competitions from the get-go it probably would have prompted a huge backlash (look at the reaction to the new playing rules).

Better instead to leave them wither of their own accord, imploding on the madness of pre-season competitions taking place pre-Christmas... It’s a nice theory at any rate, except that it probably gives Headquarters too much credit.

As an organisation the GAA has often been slow to cast aside competitions which have outlived their purpose. Look at how the Railway Cup staggered on for decades after its sell-by date has long since passed.

The GAA needs to cut out these vestigial organs because at the moment they’re little more than irritants and have the potential to do real damage (an exploding appendix to extend the metaphor).

Sure you could argue these competitions give young players a chance they otherwise might not get, but these are the same young players who are preparing for Sigerson and Fitzgibbon Cup action.

Kerry sensibly have opted out of the McGrath Cup this year (as have Tipperary), hopefully more will follow in their footsteps in the years ahead allowing the inter-county game to finally have a proper off-season.