From jersey tuggers and trash talkers to body checkers

IT’S been a bizarre week in the weird and wonderful world of GAA with the RTE staff deployment coming in for careful scrutiny, the use of social media such as Twitter rendering us all aflutter and then Waterford GAA secretary Tim O Keeffe advocating the introduction of a two tier system in football a few short years after many of the counties trying to make the breakthrough, including Waterford, railed against the notion of being consigned to the now defunct Tommy Murphy Cup based on their standing in the football hierarchy.

Six weeks since Championship 2011 began in New York, and we’ve have a lot to talk about. We’ve had one great game (Armagh v Down), two decent ones (Tyrone v Monaghan and Kildare v Meath), one surprise result (Leitrim v Sligo) and one near miss that would’ve shook preconceptions to their core when London took Mayo to extra-time just two weeks ago.

If there has been a sense of a missing ingredient in this year’s championship, it could be the regular drone of disciplinary controversies, which has tended to form the background music to far too many summers recently. Of course, it could yet become one of those championships that reinforces former Uachtarán, Nickey Brennan’s pronouncement about the GAA always being one bad match away from a disciplinary crisis. So far however, the disciplinary debate has centred on the rules rather than on the individuals and maybe this is to be welcomed.