What is it with those in sports administration wanting less instead of more? Think about it – when the Premier League began, there were 42 league games a season. The original incarnation of the Heineken Cup was a much better competition in its embryonic stage than the current truncated, rushed rabble. More recently, the GAA’s hierarchy have become obsessed with change.
From the stupid split season, to handpass rules in hurling and Jim Gavin’s committee who have revolutionised the game of Gaelic football in terms of entertainment value by retrofitting some of the best facets the game has ever had. Long, contested kick outs, high fielding, long range score-taking and matches being played at a noticeably faster and consequently more entertaining pace.
Yet there are still a cohort who are unhappy. And, to my utmost surprise, disappointment and, in truth, a modicum of embarrassment, it’s not just the usual case of ‘Ulster Says No’. Well, not totally. To my utter shock, our own manager has been among the most vociferous and scathing in his abhorrence of Jim Gavin’s 7-point-plan.
Why I do not know. Indeed, the three biggest moaners about the FRC’s revamp are the bosses of three of the teams who have fared best since their inculcation.
Robbie, Kieran McGeeney and Jim McGuinness. I honestly don’t know what their beef is with the changes. But what I do know is, if Gavin bows to the detractors, he will lose a lot of the respect and gravitas he has deservedly banked over the years.
The game needed change. Those of us who’d been beating that drum ad nauseum eventually penetrated powerful eardrums. Jim Gavin delivered change. Copius, brilliant change.
We can but hope that he and others in positions of influence are ballsy enough to stand over their work and not give to the complainants and shelve some of the magnificent seven stipulations.
It’s up to players, and particularly managers to adapt and coach to the new order. It’s not as if they are being delivered in a segregated fashion. Everybody is in the same boat. If the majority can adjust to change, the reluctant or disbelieving can and will have to do it too.
However, in the interest of fairness, it will be admitted that, if there is one stipulation, or part thereof, I’d like to see changed, not chopped, that would be a slight realignment of a 3 v. 3 dictum.
To the effect that, rather than leaving a team who have a player in the Sin Bin having to defend with just two back, the sanction should be that the team in question be obliged to switch one of their forwards into a defending positioning.
The theory being that it is easier and ‘fairer’ to play with five forwards – most commonly achieved by leaving two in the full forward line – than trying to operate for an elongated period with five defenders. Sure haven’t Meath made an art form out of it over the years! Other than that, I would again implore Jim and his magnificent band of men to leave well enough alone.
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Mind you, it’s not only in GAA there’s currently chatter concerning counterproductive catastrophic change being contemplated to a jewel in the sporting crown. As if it wasn’t bad enough even pitching the idea of going to a five day Cheltenham Festival, some bright spark has come up with the notion of switching the highlight of the horse racing year back to a three day logjam.
While I would agree with those of the view that to go to five days would absolutely dilute Festival to a watery pale shadow of its current magnificent self, there is equally a conviction that to revert to three days would not only by sporting Hari Kari, it would amount to the sport doing itself and its stakeholders a massive disservice.
There’s a certain aspect of snobbery within racing – more prevalent on the Flat – which is prone to looking down its nose at the ‘normal’ majority and focus on the elite minority. Regrettably, it has to an extent seeped into jump racing. Aided and abetted by such buffoonery as seeks to cut The Festival back to three days.
Because if it was to be shorn of the fourth day, make no mistake about it, it would be the many valuable handicaps which would undoubtedly get hit with the Sword Of Damocles. But what the toffee-nosed either may not or may not want to see is that what they and their ilk might see is ‘only’ handicaps could be another person’s lifetime ambition realised.
Horse Racing might be known as the Sport Of Kings, but the National Hunt sphere thereof is very much the kingdom of the common people. Change that and you strip the sport of its soul.
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