Kieran Shannon: 19 injections of hope for a sporting antidote to Covid-19 misery

Picture: INPHO/James Crombie

Although we can hardly wait much longer — and the Dubs obviously couldn’t — we’re nearly there now.

This day fortnight, your county teams will be a few hours either side of their first official collective training session of the season, while seven days later, the kids will finally be able to play outdoors together again.

Whatever about the country, sport will finally be opening up again. Twelve months on from Elaine Buckley putting together the most haunting if inspiring of opening Sunday Game promos, the summer won’t be out of reach. 

There will be somebody on the road, mostly parents resuming their sports taxi, shuttling their kids to their next activity. It’ll be okay for county teams to be back on the beach. And most importantly, there’ll be some bodies back on the field.

In 2021, we will have our inter-county boys and girls of summer, rather than have to wait until the winter once more to see them don the county colours.

But with that sense of anticipation and hope, we hope for some other things for sport, say 19 things, given the identity of our most challenging opponent still.

1

That in early May, adults, especially club players in all the field sports, can resume training.

On April 26, any GAA player under 18 can go back and train outdoors with their friends. Anyone over 18 not on a county panel though can’t.

For too long this winter, the voice and concerns of children and teenagers weren’t adequately heeded, nor was that of the children’s ombudsman, Niall Muldoon, who warned of the “low-level melancholy” school-going — or rather non-school-going — children were experiencing from being at home all day.

Eventually those words seemed to resonate, resulting in the recent or imminent return of kids to their schools and the playing fields, but that still leaves another demographic neglected.

To be fair, one member of the Oireachtas, a Fianna Fáil senator Malcom Byrne, back in November acknowledged the plight of young people being unable to “go to Coppers or the local nightclub” and “getting the shift”. Though the dangers of indoor gatherings meaning it’ll be another while yet before they can return to such haunts, the science now clearly shows there should be nothing prohibiting them from trying to score outdoors, in the sporting sense of the term at least.

As Ronan McGreevy of the Irish Times reported yesterday, only one in every thousand confirmed cases of Covid-19 in Ireland this past year has been the result of outdoor transmission, something he found to be consistent with international studies.

In other words, the outdoors are essentially safe, and outdoor sport assuredly is.

And yet people in their twenties and thirties who by necessity are having to constrain themselves from the sort of social indoor activity that would be the custom of anyone their age before are also being unnecessarily prohibited from engaging in outdoor sports activities.

Of course, not every twenty- or thirty-something participates in sport. But a considerable proportion of them do. And when you’re into your sport and it’s denied to you, it’s very challenging for your mental health. Ask club GAA coaches all over the country if they’ve tapered down their zoom and S&C sessions, knowing it’ll be another while before the players can return to the pitch, and virtually all of them will say the players still want to be at something, that they find the prep a huge focus and release for them in the current climate.

With the hour gone forward though, they’re now like caged tigers. At the start of May, they must be let out. It might be another while before they’ll be seen in Coppers or even let play a match, but they must be allowed some social and physical outlet. Nightclubs might still be out, but sports clubs should be in.

2

When they’re back, allow them go back into full-contact training. It might be a few months before they play games against another team, but let them play games amongst themselves. As McGreevy’s report suggests, the old stipulation of non-contact training would now be just tokenism, not science.

3

Let the kids play, roam, go mad.

In Waterford GAA’s new drive to recruit and retain more kids in Gaelic Games, former county hurler Fergal Hartley has called for clubs to be less nurseries and more like fun camps, that the environment for a six-year-old should be more akin to a birthday party than a training session. Instead of balls, bibs and cones, bring beach balls, hula hoops and water guns.

Well, in late April and well into May, that message should extend to all counties and most underage teams. While there’ll be a temptation for some coaches to try to make up for lost time, the less lines and drills, the better. Just let them play the game — and water fight if they want.

4

And don’t lay on too many nights’ training. Just like high-performance county teams will have to ease players through the gears to reduce the likelihood of injury, parents will have to watch for the kids going from zero to 90 as well. If they play three or four sports, that could mean them being out six nights a week. Sometimes maybe skip that second night of club football. Better that a 10-year-old drops the odd session in his favoured sport than drop a sport altogether.

5

That the indoor sports claim some of the summer by bringing their sports to the outdoors and the streets and parks.

6

And this time that some of them like basketball are allowed to pass the ball to one another instead of a confusing and tokenistic stipulation that it qualifies as “shared equipment”.

7

That hurling dispenses with a national league and instead runs a round-robin provincial championship like the ones that ruled the summers of 2018 and 2019.

8

That if hurling does indeed start off a league, as seems likely, that the hurling snobs don’t then complain it’s even less on the TV than football was in the early months of those summers of 2018 and 2019. The national league matters in football,. In hurling it doesn’t really, especially this year. It’ll just be a series of warm-ups, a series of phony wars.

9

That the powers-that-be take note of Colm O’Rourke’s point that the national football league requires only four games per team, not a fifth.

There’s no need for a Division Two, Three or Four final, just a weekend to determine who got promoted and who got relegated the same time the top side in Division One North faces the best in the South to decide the outright winner.

10

That we have an open-draw football championship. Last year, there was a novelty about reverting to the old-school do-or-die provincial championship format but a repeat wouldn’t capture the imagination the way an open draw would.

11

That the traditionalists realise that having no provincial titles to hand out reduces the opportunity for congregations and celebrations at a time when still not all the country will have been vaccinated.

12

That there will be qualifiers if, given there might be a league-based championship from 2022 onwards, the GAA feel obliged to have one last summer provincial championship in 2021. It wouldn’t be equitable for hurlers to have a backdoor for two straight years and not the footballers.

13

That if there is a worrying spike in cases in some parts of the country, Nphet and country remember that there was a time last year when, like the rest of Europe, different regions had different levels of lockdown. Last year when the Kildare and Laois club championships had to come to a halt for a few weeks, those in the rest of the country didn’t. The same should apply this summer.

14

That coaches realise that the 15-year-old of 2021 is different to the 15-year-old of 2019. They’re in a different place emotionally, mentally, technically, tactically.

15

That administrators realise it as well and adjust their competition structures to try to keep as many kids as possible in the sport.

16

That the Government and the FAI finally realise and admit that it’s not really a runner for the country to host Euro 2020 games. It’s going to come a month or two too soon.

17

Ditto for the Government and Basketball Ireland concerning hosting the European men’s small nations tournament in Limerick.

18

That in the second half of the summer, we’ll be able to get back in to see some games again.

19

That you stay safe and well and a vaccination is coming to you and yours soon.