If all my dreams came true in 2015...

As one season draws to a close, Dónal Óg Cusack looks to the hurling gods and reveals the dream scenario for 2015.

I THOUGHT when I was playing the end of the hurling year was a little taste of death. Even as I get older, though, the end of the hurling year still hits like a dose of something serious.

There’s a bit of a panic in the head. No big game to be looking forward to next week. All talked out about the last big game. Even the club scene is down to the end games and getting ready to shut down for the year. Then it’s like the cartoons when we were kids. A little sign is about to come up saying, That’s All Folks!

So for this year the hurling is dead. Long live the hurling. No point in looking back. Let’s be the first to look forward. If some genie grants me all the wishes I’m due after 100 years (isn’t it?) of living in the fantasy land created by the Cork County Board here are those wishes in random order.

* That referees start understanding that the rule book if full of rules. It’s not a series of suggestions. The rules are the directions as to how the greatest game in the world should be played. They aren’t well intentioned hints as to how referees might develop their own trademark style of refereeing. When serious teams are spending as much time studying the quirks and habits of referees as they are studying the opposition there is something wrong. When counties feel free to sample and comment on referees like they were at a wine tasting evening, there is something wrong.

* That Clare will reach their full potential. If that group of players don’t win three All-Irelands they have failed. People say, aren’t Clare lucky to have such an incredible group of players come along at once. But from Cratloe to Clonlara to Crusheen to anywhere else you care to mention this group of players have benefited from a culture that learned from the failures that followed the mid-90’s .

This group didn’t just happen. Many, many people helped produce them and gave them the space to grow. This group owes it to themselves and to all this people who worked with them and for them to get the best out of themselves.

* While we’re at it, next wish is Cork will get a modern day game plan. Big picture and small picture. When we have done looking at Kilkenny celebrating their 10th title of the Cody era we need to go away and have an honest conversation about why we stopped competing with Kilkenny half way through.

* Oh, and that Dublin will acquire a new manager who takes them to the next level. In short that level is the summit of an All Ireland title. Nothing else. Of the viable names I have heard mentioned Ger Cunningham is the best bet. I think you have to have been to the summit to lead to the summit. Ger knows his way. I’ve heard myself mentioned and it is a job I would love to do sometime but not this time. Hurling needs Dublin to finish the job which has been underway for 10 years.

* The GAA needs to start using more statistics on its players. History demands it. The future demands it. Care demands it. Even this week on the most basic level I hear so many conversations about how many All-Ireland medals various Kilkenny lads have. He has seven and the other fella has eight I think, no maybe nine. We need a partnership to form a statistical database which will not just tell us those basic details but tell us how many games each player in the country plays at all levels in any given year.

All it involves is giving every active players a code number which goes on every team sheet and gets fed into a computer by a referee or county board afterwards.

* An odd one next. That somebody create a book about the Kilkenny hurlers that might be of more interest than a groceries list. Not just games played and won but a serious look at how the culture they have grew and evolved. At the moment it’s as if North Korea keep coming to Croke Park in September and winning All-Irelands Kim Jong Cody issues a couple of edicts when it’s done and that’s it. The curtains close. There has to be thousands of great stories in their journey. There has to be so many things that other hurling counties can learn from. Is there one person on the county willing to write the story and then defect?

* And away from literature can the GAA start looking at ways of marketing our games better. Start with putting the players’ names on jerseys (we have a lot to learn from our sisters on camogie and football with regard to these things). Names on jerseys. Headshots beside team lists in programmes. Counties wearing uniform helmets (a company like Mycro could create hugely popular Cork helmets, Kilkenny helmets etc. the work they have done on helmets for the Super Eleven games has been remarkable)

We need to sit down too and work out a better relationship between media and players. While we all bicker about who does what, rugby is marketing itself through the media in a far smoother way.

* For the Hurling 2020 committee under Liam Sheedy to come out and show some serious carraigs and hit the GAA with a series of radical and progressive ideas. No moral high ground stuff from the big hurling counties and know “lord save us all” self pity from the weaker counties. Let’s use the imagination, think outside the box, see 2020 not just as a target but as the beginning of the road to 2050 and be brave.

* Next, something on Sky that doesn’t involve a winking Rachel Wyse reference. That the Sky deal develops in such a way as it continues to grow the game internationally. We have been through the first season of Sky and nobody died. Well done to all involved for that. The climax of the season drew decent figures for Sky in the UK with very little promotion. That’s where the future lies.

Sky may have begun their involvement with Gaelic Games by being (for reasons which were complicated) in competition with RTÉ but now very far down the road they will look at what they have on their hands and see that they have something worth developing in new markets.

* That the 2015 GAA/GPA deal gets concluded and implements with only a little bit of hassle. (Just to keep us all happy!)

* Now. Please let somebody in Dublin borrow the steel carraigs from Liam Sheedy’s committee for a while and decide that the underage development structures in hurling won’t be a keep fit class for young lads who ultimately dream of playing football for Dublin. Let the players decide at 16 where they want their inter-county future to lie. Dublin’s future is too serious for the old romantic raiméis about dual players. Hurlers have to hurl. I repeat because I know this is misquoted a lot.

Dublin hurlers are no more manufactured than any counties hurlers. Every hurler from Henry Shefflin down is manufactured. In fact Henry is the greatest and most inspiring example of the rewards of hard intelligent work paying off in the end.

It is a vocation, an art, a science that they undertake to master. Choose the right path at sixteen. Go for it.

* The great penalty debate should be finished by the spring. Shouldn’t it? One on one from the twenty one yard line. The forward can’t complain. Any goalie worth his salt would love it. If I were playing county still I’d try to develop a technique for bringing lads down but not getting sent off, just so I could face those penalties. The mind games. The spectacle. The theatre. I’d be wobbling the legs. Hanging from the post. Throwing in dud balls. Giving the eyeballs. Bring it on!!

* I may never have mentioned this before but the “spare hand” is a disease eating away at our game. Referee’s need to address it as a priority. It’s not down for interpretation. It’s just an illegal way of stopping better players from playing. There are so many legal ways of causing a turnover in hurling. There is so much time when the ball is in play and can be hooked, blocked or pulled on. The spare hand is ugly and unworthy of most of the players who use it. Make it a thing of the past.

* Genie, not all wishes are local but some are. Can we look at the redesign of Páirc Uí Chaoimh again? I don’t know a lot about architecture but I know what I don’t like. The plan looks unattractive, expensive (and surely going to get more expensive as all stadiums do) and saddled with the responsibility of having the county’s smallest Centre of Excellence stuck onto it.

Given something has to be done with the current place is the basic bowl structure impossible to open out and refurbish, adding offices, opening out the tunnels into brighter spaces, putting seats in for creatures bigger than hobbits and maybe saving €35m which could be put into developing and looking after coaching and players of all levels. It’s not too late for clubs to demand another look at this, to have more explanations as to what is going on and what the impact will be. Let’s hear questions asked from people that the powers that be are obliged to give answers to. It’s our stadium, our county, our games.

* Galway to stumble somehow out of the forest of mediocrity they have been lost in for twenty years to so. The Galway county board need to stop being so content with having it’s underage teams winning the lottery of hurling’s geography and being involved in the closing stages of underage championships every year. That talent needs to be tested in serious provincial championships, it needs to experience more disappointment and to come through tougher and more determined as seniors. Sounds harsh, but hurling needs Galway.

* Who has those shiny steel carraigs at the moment? Right, hand them over to somebody who will create a proper structure for a season. More senior inter county games but compressed into a short time frame. Every county to get a minimum number of championship games (imagine how it would bring on players, appeal to TV and allow every county to sell season tickets to cover a guaranteed amount of league and championship games) we need to recognise also that under the current ramshackle system clubs and club players are getting shafted.

Let’s be clear on the rules as to when county players are available to club or county and lets block off certain periods of the year for club play.

Finally the All Ireland club finals should be one part of a day or weekend of celebration in every club. Ideas and imagination wanted here.

* Can we stop patronising those counties like Laois or Westmeath or Kerry or Antrim who have the will to make a breakthrough and instead start giving them serious help to make that breakthrough. You can’t lead to the summit unless you have been there. Can we finance bright men who have been there to work (full time, not as a favour to a president you never spoke to before) in partnership with those counties, coaching the coaches, laying down the structures and pathways etc, so that in ten years time we have maybe sixteen counties capable of making an impact on an All Ireland series.

Off the top of the head that’s about it for now. Don’t want to be greedy or unrealistic.

Off to hibernate from media duties now for the winter. Many thanks for reading and for all the comments good and bad.

That’s all folks…@donalogc