Kieran Shannon: Their work may be done, but Club Players Association legacy will endure

Behind closed doors the reception from the GAA was often frosty, bordering on patronising

Tue, 02 Mar, 2021 - 09:49

In the end it took not just one CPA but a second to fix the fixtures.

Without the Corona Pandemic Affliction, the efforts of the Club Players Association wouldn’t have been enough to get a split season across the line, at least without massive rancour and fanfare.

Yet the reverse also applies: if it wasn’t for a man from Clontibret called Declan Brennan taking the initiative to establish a body to address the most pressing and fundamental issue for club players across the country, there’s not a chance that even the Covid-19 crisis would have propelled Croke Park into so radically altering its competition calendar.

The topic was only on the Clár this year because the CPA ensured it had been on the agenda for the last four years. There was such a consensus at Congress last weekend only because a group of people had been willing to agitate.

It wasn’t always easy for them. They failed to be officially recognised at Congress 2017, with only a tactful intervention from former president Nickey Brennan preventing the fledgling body suffering an outright rejection and humiliation.

At Congress 2018 just one of their motions made it onto the Clár only for it to be soundly defeated and for executive member Liam Griffin to be subjected to some schoolboy jibes on the floor.

At Congress 2019 President John Horan had a pop at them in his address, accusing them of not forwarding a “more detailed sample” of how they would “fill the blank canvas on fixtures which they talk about” when they’d actually presented multiple proposals on how the fixtures could be fixed.

Behind closed doors the reception was often just as frosty, bordering on patronising.

Men like Liam Griffin, Derek Kavanagh, and Kieran Fitzgerald who had helped fill Croke Park as either coaches or players were made feel like usurpers in the committee rooms of that same stadium, even though none of them was even on expenses let alone a salary for their work with the CPA.

But what mattered was they had been able to navigate their way into those corridors of power and sit around the same table as Horan and headquarter’s various other heavy hitters.

A little less than two years ago, I also sat across a table from the CPA’s chairperson, Micheál Briody, in the offices of the Monaghan-based duck business which he was and remains CEO of. While only weeks earlier he’d claimed Horan’s remarks at Congress had been “disrespectful” and “playing to the audience”, his tone was now more reconciliatory. Horan and Tom Ryan had indicated that they were establishing a competition and fixtures task force which the CPA would have representation on.

“We’re excited about that because it affords an opportunity to the GAA to change the whole fixtures (schedule) for the better good for every player — intercounty college, club, the whole works,” he’d say.

“We believe there is good faith being shown by an Uachtarán (Horan) and the DG (Ryan). We know they are committed to this.

“And they have the potential to be the biggest change agents in the GAA of the last 30 years, since the Peter Quinn presidency (when it was decided to revamp Croke Park). Their legacy could be that significant.”

That quote has aged well. At this remove it’d be fair to say that Horan’s legacy is indeed secure, historic even, rivalling Seán Kelly’s presidency as the most eventful and impactful since Quinn’s. Though the first year at the helm was uncertain, unimpressive even, his leadership during the Covid crisis was assured and inspired, while on his beat that once seemingly most unresolvable and acrimonious issue has been resolved definitely and harmoniously. There is no longer club versus county, only club and county.

Now Horan is gone. And with him very likely is the body that helped secure his legacy, even if at times they were at loggerheads. In helping him help fix the fixtures, the CPA have made themselves redundant.

From the outset their founder, the aforementioned Brennan, said they’d fold up once the issue had been rectified, just as he vowed they weren’t going to let up until such change happened. Briody also expressed a similar sentiment.

For 25 years he played adult club football in Meath for Oldcastle. The killer he found was the uncertainty that went with waiting for their next battle.

“You’d play a couple of games in April and then sit around, not knowing and not being able to plan until Meath were knocked out of the championship,” he’d say in that 2019 interview. “Then they could be toppled by someone unexpectedly in the qualifiers and you’d be ‘Oh, Jesus, right!’ and all the texts would be going round: ‘We need to have training tomorrow! Championship could be next weekend or if not, the weekend after.’

“It was just madness. I used to look enviously on at lads who’d get their soccer or rugby schedules at the start of the year and it’d have a firm time and a date five months in advance. I didn’t know if I was playing the next week. I never had a June or July holiday in case Meath were knocked out and we were out the following week.”

Now Briody and his counterparts can take pride that current and future club players and their families will now be able to plan their holidays. They won’t be playing championship until August. And while there’ll be something unseasonal and unsettling at first at having All-Irelands in July, overall it is for the better, prolonging club and inter-county careers and putting less strain on families and relationships.

Tom Ryan and Horan’s successor, Larry McCarthy, still have more work to do. The fixtures may be fixed but the competition structures aren’t, at least not optimally, or at least not in football at inter-county level.

The hope is that the GAA continue to be bold on that front, starting with this year’s championship. While the old do-or-die provincial format worked well as a once-off in 2020, this year an open draw could be trialled, albeit with either a backdoor or a preliminary group stage to ensure every team has at least two games, especially if there is no national league.

The Fix the Fixtures saga is just the latest example of what a bit of daring and imagination and collaboration can achieve. The GPA, it should be noted, were the ones who pushed for the inter-county season to be wrapped up by the end of July; not even the CPA had been that optimistic and audacious in their various split-season proposals. But between both players’ bodies and Croke Park, they came up with something that not even their detractors could knock or want to stop.

The CPA executive last night met on Zoom to discuss if their business was done. By the time you read this, they may no longer exist. Either way their legacy will endure.