Every time I feel like I am getting close to some form of peace with the GAA’s split season, something crops up to remind me again of how hideous and counterproductive it is.
As one former Meath player put it to me over the weekend “Lads busting their guts training since January for three games in a fortnight in August”.
Aside from the fact that there are numerous ways from which the stupidity of that could be díssected, surely the most obvious thereof is that – as it currently plays out – it still leads to ‘ordinary’ club players training for months on end for something which for the vast majority will be over before it has begun in earnest.
Take my own club as an example – our adult footballers came together for the first time for the 2026 season in the few days between Christmas and New Year in preparation for the three round Cup competitions which were all run off by the second week in February. From our point of view at least because we didn’t advance to the knockout stages of same.
So that meant another wait of around five weeks before the All County Leagues for underway on St Patrick’s Day. Again they were ran off with needless rapidity which from our perspective meant going from early June until the second week of August without a competitive game. Helping the club players how, exactly?
Just to be clear clear here, what you are reading is not the product of a “Poor us” mindset, our disappointment and no little embarrassment were entirely of our own making.
However, it hardly seems fair that for more than half of the clubs in the county their seasons ended in the first week of September and they will not see action again until at least a month of 2027 has expired.
That’s an awful lot of down time to be filled and there are literally numerous other codes in which players can and do fill the void. Which in itself goes some way to explaining why player retention is such an issue.
Just three years ago our club won the county Minor Championship in both hurling and football but even without having actual figures in front of me it’s obvious that player retention within those teams has been poor at best.
That, in turn, means that collectively we as a club haven’t reached anywhere near the heights which should have been possible had those who could or should have been available been so. Mind you, in terms of the bigger picture, the spectacle of AFL clubs openly boasting about the number of Irish players they have on their roster should be signpost enough about the damage the split season is doing.
That said, at a more mundane and basic level, the inter county season being finished up ridiculously early and the club fare not going to plan from a local perspective has meant alternative routes to occupying the mind in a sporting sense have had to be sought out.
Well in fact they haven’t, for the simple reason that what would be in normal (whatever that is!) times minor bullet points on the sporting schedule have – in the reverse of the words famously sang by the great Ella Fitzgerald – strangely changed from minor to major.
Namely, the accumulation over the course of one week of eight medals between the European Championships in both Athletics and Swimming, Eddie Dunbar peddling his way to a stage victory in the Vuelta e Espana and Shane Lowry blasting his way to yet another Irish Open success in what Rory McIlroy famously describes as hitting a small white ball around a field!
That’s without mention of the nation’s greatest ever sports star bringing her career to a dream conclusion in the nation’s greatest sporting venue. A stadium which, had it been put forward as the proposed Irish venue for the staging of the Women’s Champions League Final would almost certainly have won the bid ahead of what I presume was the Millennium Stadium – or whatever it’s called now – in Cardiff.
Instead, because of the heinous act which bringing in the split season, the forthcoming event in Croke Park which has most of the nation talking is Harry f*****g (has no) Styles. Still, at least the gombeen Gallagher brothers are being dispatched to a field in Slane. Sure The Traitors fit in right well up there!
Seriously though, even if you take it that the skit doing the rounds online with the old stager purporting to imply GAA stands for Girls Aren’t Allowed was officially in jest, it is factually beyond question that incoming Uachtarain CLG Mr Derek Kent has some serious reputational damage to repair after the past few years.
Much, but not enough, has been made of the fact that TikTok had had a ‘Change of heart’ and decided to appear before an Oireachtas Committee as part of the fallout from the motorway tragedy of August 16th near Moone in Co Kildare. Specifically, the role their platform played in some of the social commentary surrounding the incident in which four innocent members of a Co Carlow family were left with life altering injuries.
I am not sure as to whether, under Irish law, they could be subpoenaed or whatever the equivalent thereof is in these parts but if it is they should have been obliged to do so without ever having the right to refuse to do so. And, even more so, similar obligations should be imposed on all ‘branches’ of the GAA to explain the catastrophic, embarrassing implosion of the supposed integration process involving the GAA, the LGFA and the Camogie Association.
And why did the lengthy process, which, according to those with the best interests of the merger at heart, was making commendable progress, come a cropper you might ask? Because old man Burns and his sycophantic yes man Mr Smithers, eh, Ryan, are terrified of change and their defence mechanism for illustrating that it won’t work is to try and deflect blame in every direction possible rather than admit their own fear.
If it wasn’t Burns pulling asinine figures like 45m and 90m out of thin air regarding the cost of amalgamation it was a combination of the two of them labelling Mary McAleese’s take on misogyny within the GAA as “Offensive”.
Eh, newsflash lads – someone’s opinion cannot be pigeon holed as offensive in the broad sense. You might be offended by it, as is your right, but what right has any individual to declare faux outrage on behalf of the masses? Or if they do genuinely believe as such, where was the commensurate brouhaha when the self approved pontificator for what remains of unionism, Mr Bryson gloated as what he termed ‘The GAA Road’ not coming to pass.
To give that a bit of context, it’s my understanding that the point the little slime ball was referring to was a road on which several known GAA volunteers and supporters were known to have lost their lives.
From the viewpoint of someone who’s life revolves primarily around sport, the feats of the likes of Mona McSharry and Daniel Wiffen and Rhasidat Adelekè and, in particular, Kate O’Connor, helped fill the void left by those charged with being guardians of our national sports being more interested in staging other sports and rock concerts than what they are in their privileged position to be doing.
Fág freagra