Larry Ryan: Ladies football venue controversy far from perfect pitch for equality

REBEL WITH A CAUSE: Cork manager Ephie Fitzgerald, seen here with Melissa Duggan, is furious the All-Ireland ladies football semi-final has been moved, six days before the match, from Limerick to Dublin, as the Limerick hurlers are training at the original venue. Picture: Eóin Noonan/Sportsfile 

“When the LGFA booked the Limerick venue in the middle of last month, they were told by Limerick County Board that in the event of Limerick reaching the All-Ireland hurling final, John Kiely’s panel would get preference over the ladies football fixture if it was a case the Limerick hurlers required use of LIT Gaelic Grounds for a training session on Sunday, December 6.”

You skim over many sentences when keeping track of the various gripes and grouses over fixture and venue arrangements for Gaelic games.

But sometimes you stop, and find yourself doubling back and reading again, to be sure to be sure. The sentence above, written by Eoghan Cormican in the Irish Examiner this week, was a case in point.

Try breaking that one down to a nine-year-old girl who heard the story on the news.

Yeah, the All-Ireland ladies football semi-final has been moved, six days before the match, from Limerick to Dublin, as men are training.

How would you even start?

Welllll, it’s because…

You can feed her all the hashtags she can eat, buy her all the girl power books, show her all the role models. But one sentence like this lets the air of dignity hissing out. And she’ll quickly remember other indignities, notably the lack of female Match Attax.

Never mind the nine-year-old, how does anyone adequately explain that sentence to the women playing in that match tomorrow?

It’s the kind of sentence you go back to the following morning, convinced that you’ll be reading it in a different light.

That it will have served as a breaking point, a turning point, a pivotal moment where everybody involved acknowledges the absurdity of what just happened. Where the issue has been sorted and a vow made that something like this will never happen again.

But of course this wasn’t a watershed sentence. Because you still read sentences like that all the time.

You read plenty of them in October, when the WGPA released its study of the experiences of female players, ‘Levelling The Field’.

We heard that while male inter-county players were getting 65c per mile in travel expenses, 93% of female players get no expenses at all. That women spend up to €200 per week on fuel to play county. We heard that men receive more than four times more investment through Government funding than female players.

This week we saw Kilkenny camogie celebrate winning their All-Ireland semi-final by setting up a Gofundme page to raise funds to cover expenses for next Saturday’s final.

So this was no pivotal moment. Was this even about equality?

Next day, the LGFA ‘noted’ the media comment around the refixture and wished to set the record straight. “The LGFA wishes to categorically state that we fully understand Limerick’s wish to use their own venue for training purposes next Sunday.”

And of course the Limerick County Board had done nothing wrong. This was a fully understandable situation in a world where all the facilities are in the control of the men’s organisation while the women go cap in hand for a field to play in. Facilities that, in many cases, have been built with the help of capital grants.

This was a fully understandable situation in a world where many of the most successful players in Cork Gaelic games history never got to play in Páirc Uí Chaoimh.

And it was a fully predictable situation to the thousands of adult women club players bumped onto the ‘back pitch’ by an underage boys team.

In this fully understandable normality, Cork players will now face a nine-hour round trip this weekend, driving individually. At short notice, they have booked an overnight stay.

“Would this happen in the men’s game? Not in a million years,” said Cork manager Ephie Fitzgerald, who described the switch as “pathetic”.

“It wouldn’t be allowed happen that an All-Ireland semi-final couldn’t be organised properly and that six days before the game, in the middle of a pandemic, we’d be told we have to go to Dublin.

Everybody deserves respect and the ladies aren’t getting the respect they deserve here.

Even as the advocates for women’s sport mull over solutions — is it full integration into the GAA? — the counter is always thrown that the male sports are the primary revenue generator.

Yet for sports that lean so heavily on the rhetoric of community, a scenario like this diminishes all of them.

A scenario where the LGFA, for whatever reason, had to take a punt on Limerick not winning their hurling semi-final when scratching around for a field last month.

This story might be as much about administration as equality, but if it looks like inequality, the result is just as demoralising.

“If anybody can justify that to me, I’d love to hear the argument that that’s okay,” said Fitzgerald.

A version of that argument for a nine-year-old girl would be great too.

Underdog tag fits Tipp better

“I found myself cheering for Tipperary the last day, I felt dirty.” Another stark sentence, this one uttered by a friend from Offaly.

David Power’s footballers have done their county a remarkable service in allowing its people to sample a different way of life for a weekend or two. Where the alien smell of goodwill hangs in the air, or at least where they aren’t surrounded on all sides by ill-will.

The big GAA weekends can be a lonely place for the blue and gold hurling faithful. Knowing full well that their neighbours will enjoy a restful night’s sleep only when Tipp are out of the Championship.

This is the burden a talented but humble people must carry, often unfairly denounced as arrogant because of a natural exuberance when playing the games they love.

The footballers, noticeably, share much of the same joie de vivre of their hurling brethren. You can see it in their unusual habits, such as their tendency to kick the ball.

And yet, some would say their perennial underdog status fits better with the unassuming demeanour of the typical Tipp man or woman.

Dignified folk, often overlooked for investment and infrastructure, but just getting on with things, just giving it their best shot.

End of the Red affair with VAR

Many great romances dissolve into bitter acrimony — and so it is with Liverpool fans falling out of love with VAR. As the tech bedded in last season, it managed to keep this powerful lobby group on board, with a few helping hands along the way to glory. But a couple have gone against them now and they have seen enough. VAR must go.

VAR could be up against it, since the other key lobby group — Manchester United fans — have little skin in this game, knowing the traditionally steady supply of penalties at Old Trafford should be maintained with or without its involvement.

We do seem to have moved onto another phase of VAR, the one everybody feared, where ‘clear and obvious’ is long forgotten, and the machines are poking their noses into every clash.

Refereeing overlord David Elleray, himself responsible for some of the handball confusion, summed up this week the age-old problem VAR can never fix.

“Half the coaches want consistency, half want common sense. And common sense and consistency aren’t happy bed-fellows.”

Heroes & villains

STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN

Caoimhín Kelleher: Or, as George Hamilton has christened him, The Cucumber Kid — “he’s so cool”.

Tony Óg Regan: His honesty in Damien Lawlor’s book When the World Stops Watching looks set to trigger a flood of admissions from fellow former players that team sport can often be a lonely individual road.

HELL IN A HANDCART

The WhatsApp rumour-mongers: Becoming ever more ingenious. Quite apart from the turmoil caused to their victims, how can the papers possibly compete with the drama in these colourful stories from inside various camps?

Svenja Huth: Did Katie McCabe up like a kipper for that Tallaght penalty.