John Fallon: Future of Kennedy Cup shakes faultlines
The Cork Schoolboys League U14 team and management after winning the Kennedy Cup at UL.
Only the foolish would dare tell Daryl Murphy what to do.
Football has been his life and he's lived a full one beyond comparison to most. After enduring the familiar pain of his first cross-channel move as a teen not working out at Luton Town, the striker established himself with Waterford's first team to earn a return.
He played and scored in both the English and Scottish Premier Leagues, won the Championship's Golden Boot and completed the short-term job tasked of him by Rafa Benitez in Newcastle United's promotion-clinching season.
International football was a slower burner but worth the wait. Starts at Euro 2016 against Italy and France preceded goals against Serbia and Moldova on the way to a World Cup playoff.
Now approaching his 40th birthday, his most recent move went full circle by rejoining the Blues and extended it in the case of his son.
Murphy made his initial splash in 1998 by leading his native county to Kennedy Cup success, bagging a brace in the final. The underage tournament still exists almost a quarter of a century on but is gradually losing its prestige.
Had Murphy heeded the warnings contained in a letter to parents from his former hometown club's academy, he'd have excluded his offspring from the five-day event in order to prepare for the upcoming U14 national league season.
Instead, none of the families invested in a two-year journey towards their pinnacle at University of Limerick blinked. Waterford retained their strongest squad, reaching the final by beating the perennial superpowers DDSL en route.
They are an endangered species. Once the epicentre for the best against the best nationwide, the 32-team event has in recent years lost Kildare and Athlone, while the vast majority of other counties have seen the squads they began with rendered unrecognisable by depletion.
Just Wexford and Carlow joined Waterford in the minority.
Winners Cork tried their best to engineer a seamless transition too, only for their efforts to be rebuffed. The notion of players training with national clubs for fixtures not starting until the summer while bowing out of their grassroots phase at the Kennedy Cup wasn't entertained. Freedom of parental choice was cited.
Cork and other leagues had worked off the presumption that the decision of the FAI board to delay the U14 national league until July would dovetail a smooth handover.
What sounded a compromise had no chance of success, for once the association accepted player registrations from national league clubs, practicalities superseded. The folding of Cork's league champions Castleview midway through their title defence was a microcosm of the carnage caused around the country.
"Personally, I think it's a disgrace what was allowed to happen," said Cork's winning coach Stephen O'Sullivan. "Once Cork City and Cobh Ramblers came knocking, we had only five players left from the squad we began with at an U12 tournament in Clare.
"We weren't stopping those lads from leaving but it's unfortunate they missed out on the biggest schoolboy tournament in Ireland."
That assertion is being challenged by the FAI's policy in recent years of reducing the age-levels of their youth leagues.
Not even their board's intervention midstream could halt the changeover and how they – especially incoming Director of Football Marc Canham – handle next year's Kennedy Cup will be fascinating.
The usual response to extracting the venom from this stinging argument has already unfolded in the shape of creating a working group.
Big issues call for big responses and the FAI certainly went big when recently inviting the factions to the Castleknock Hotel for a day-long session lasting from 8.30am till late afternoon.
From the national league side were Shane Robinson and Conor O'Grady, academy chiefs at Shamrock and Sligo Rovers respectively, with three officials from the Schoolboys FAI (SFAI) representing the grassroots.
FAI staffers Jonathan Hill, Mark Scanlon, Ger McDermott, Will Clarke and Cathal Dervan attended too, along with board members Packie Bonner and Tom Browne.
Also part of the think-tank were Nic Callow, formerly general secretary of the English Premier League and Laura Finnegan, the renowned research analyst with a specialty in sports development.
Other meetings have been held since but it will undoubtedly take diplomatic powers to resolve a chasm that has been a long time coming to a head.
Former government minister Dermot Ahern, these days the independent chair of the national league committee and another attendee in Castleknock, may have to draw on his experience of brokering peace in the north to achieve a similar ceasefire in Irish football.
The commonly thrown-out twin cures of lowering the Kennedy Cup to U13 and forcing affiliates to replicate the League of Ireland by shadowing the summer season model will require convincing.
For starters, assembling younger teams in a centralised location for a football festival necessitates losing a week of primary school – simply a non-starter on various fronts.
Switching from the traditional June date throws up all manner of obstacles too, be it player registrations or availability of campus accommodation. There's also the unintended consequence within the revamp of one age-group – the 2009-born intake – missing out on the experience entirely.
Or the solution could be for the FAI to finish what they started. This week, three of the Waterford squad migrated to the national league set-up, facing Blackburn Rovers in a friendly tournament geared towards the opening fixtures on Saturday week. Everyone was a winner, including the Murphys.
