PM O'Sullivan: The split season remains an atomic topic
SPLIT SEASON: Na Piarsaigh captain William O'Donoughue celebrates with the cup and teammates after the Limerick County Senior Club Hurling Championship Final. Pic: Ben McShane/Sportsfile
Halloween is dusted for another year. That odd moment when fears and scares are met with a certain glee? This dynamic will persist in GAA circles over the coming months.
Persistence in discussion measures a question’s attraction. The Halloween dynamic might in another sense ‘knock the turkey out of it’. A memorable phrase I heard used by Connemara men on a 1980s building site in London, when they were expecting to stay put for a nice few months more, making Christmas and beyond.
Scare stories are a form of entertainment. No shortage of such stories in discussion of the GAA’s immediate future. Yet no quick fix solutions lie to hand.
Restoring U18 as the Minor grade offers no magic wand. Nor would collapsing Minor and U21/U20 into a single U19 grade. Hollowing out? This kind of enhancement tactic only works, once a year, with pumpkins.
Winter talk is currently split season talk. The thinning of action into club provincial championships provides a natural pause, a de facto invitation to gripes and speculation. We listen, most of the time. But how much do we learn?
Last April, Dónal Óg Cusack spoke on in notable terms. He was admirably blunt: “I don’t like that we have given up such a big part of the season. I think we have handed it over for other sports to go in there. September for me was all about hurling, all about the All-Ireland final.”
This take runs increasingly influential. The previous November, contemplating the 2022 season, DJ Carey stated cognate reservations. He was equally blunt: “I just don’t understand that we have the mindset that an All-Ireland final can be over in July and the rest of the year is given over to club action. I like to think I’m a very good club man myself. I always have been. But we’re now rushing our main competition, we’re fitting everything into half a year.”
Such sentiment, now widespread, cannot be ignored. I understand the two men’s frustration. But let me offer one caveat.
This reservation concerns the idea that rugby and soccer are rivals for attention and recruits. This emphasis possesses coherence. Fair play to Cusack for raising the matter.
Yet I confess to being perplexed. Go back 20 years. The great majority of Irish people, inside and outside the GAA, were adamantly in favour of Croke Park being ‘opened up’ to rugby and soccer.
Fair enough. But consider a statistical inevitability: many of the people now terribly unhappy about a July All-Ireland Final, and the inferred advantage to other codes, were the same people who claimed, 20 years ago, Gaelic games are not in any competition with other codes.
I find such doublethink one of 21st century Irish culture’s oddest aspects. What lies beneath the phenomenon?
Which or whether, Senior Finals in mid July is symptom rather than cause. Any serious debate on intercounty hurling’s structure needs to reflect, with a complete absence of sentimentality, on the merits and the demerits of a province-centred arrangement.
Spool on. Does hurling really need both a league and round robin-orientated provincial championships? Not to my mind. The round robin system got introduced in hurling as a kneejerk reaction to the Super Eights initiative in Gaelic football for 2018.
Between league and round robins, the small ball sphere simply has acquired too many games at intercounty level. Start with this recognition and proceed from there. One of the wisest GAA men I ever knew forever stressed a particular summary: "The harder thing to do is nearly always the right thing to do." Another recognition hovers. While the Munster Championship remains a fabled creature, fixtures coherence will stay a unicorn. The worst kind of saddle? One made of sentimentality.
The split season model did not fall out of a cloudless sky. This model arose during a stormy period during the last decade, one that heard talk of marching on Croke Park, of strike action by stewards. You might have deplored that talk and you might still feel the same. But disapproval, past or present, cannot alter what actually happened.
Memories can be fierce short. A few years ago, the Club Players Association contemplated those drastic actions in their crusade on behalf of the regular footballer, the regular hurler. The CPA have only gone away in the sense that winter goes away. The CPA will re-emerge if certain conditions re-emerge.
A crisis involves many facets, many of them awful, but a crisis also counts as a focusing device. One effect of the Covid-19 pandemic became a vision of alternative possibilities. That vision cannot now be wished away. Some version of the split season is here to stay.
One group disbanded in March 2021, issuing a plain statement: “The CPA was established in 2016 and launched in 2017 by a group of GAA volunteers to lobby and campaign on the single issue of fixing the fixtures for all players. This was driven by alarm bells over GAA player participation and drop-out levels. It was due to serious concerns related to players’ physical and mental wellbeing, because of the demands and uncertainty of the playing season.”
Their statement concluded: “With Congress at the weekend making the historic decision to institute a split season model, the CPA Executive considers its task is now complete.”
The split season remains an atomic topic, edgy and combustible. Atomic, twice over: you cannot get away from the debate and lurking within the debate are elements not always visible. The split season is as much about the Munster Championship, truth told, as it is about a July finish.
The pumpkins are quenched for another year. But light, in the sense of clarity, remains at a premium. The split season? This topic needs to be sliced and diced, separated out into its true elements.
Otherwise the progress made will be the progress of a spinning top.
