Kieran Shannon: Gaelic football needs voices for change, or it faces another summer off-Broadway

Bad stuff will happen to Gaelic football when good people say nothing

Clare manager Colm Collins doesn’t mind playing Kerry and Limerick and Tipperary yet again in the spring in a springtime provincial round-robin championship, but he’d like his players and the public to experience playing someone else in their opening championship games. Picture: INPHO/Laszlo Geczo

Before the All Ireland quarter-final weekend of 2016, the Super 8s had only existed in Páraic Duffy’s imagination and nowhere else. There had been no demand for it. Not from the GPA or any player, manager, official, or the public itself, as much as there would have been the odd cry for the better teams to play each other more often.

But what the Super 8s had was a Daddy in Duffy. And what that Daddy had was conviction. It was his baby and he was going to move heaven and earth for it to see the light of day. When he announced the pregnancy that particular August, he pre-empted every possible criticism and, in a lengthy document, presented an argument to counter and appease all of them. And sure enough, within nine months, Duffy’s baby was delivered and christened at a Special Congress in the spring of 2017.