Lighting the touchpaper on the All Stars
It’s that chunk of space and time between the end of the All-Ireland football final and the first round of the league when the vacuum created by the lack of games and razzmatazz is filled by all sorts of stuff that we don’t give a hoot about when it’s summer and the living is easy.
Up to now, it’s not been all that bad. The embers first lit by Donegal’s epic campaign and ultimate victory have stayed alight all the way through to the present week with the McGee brothers, Eamon and Neil, popping up to promote the new Medal of Honour video game, of all things.
See? Silly season.
Still, the alternatives are far from attractive as, while football committees and rule changes are undoubtedly worthy and merit great debate, they just don’t get the juices flowing like a proper row — and we’re not just talking about the painfully frequent bouts of violence that accompany our national games.
Thank the gods then for the All-Stars which, when you think of it, boils down to a small group of people meeting in a room to argue over something which will, in the end, lead to hundreds and thousands of other little inflagrations in homes, offices and pubs around the country.
It has ever been thus and this year was hardly going to be any different with protestations over the players chosen and ignored, the rules by which they were selected or even the ‘know-nothings’ who deemed it that so-and-so should get a spot and so-an-so eile should not.
Bear in mind that this is coming from a former member of the ‘know-nothing executive’, as yours truly somehow found himself sitting in a very plush room in Dublin’s Westbury Hotel two years ago as a member of the All-Stars Steering Committee. It was, in fairness, a jazzy kind of cell, but a cell nonetheless.
Unwritten confidentiality agreements and a respect for colleagues and the players themselves doesn’t allow for much in the way of revelations here but it was unquestionably an interesting experience for someone for whom the word committee has never failed to elicit a shudder of dread.
If memory serves — and that is unlikely, given the first child was expected to announce itself to the world at any point — the hurling selection was a piece of cake, polished off with a relish that everyone could enjoy, while the football was like a piece of cake mixed with gravel and gum.
It took us forever to get through it. If you’ll remember, this was the year the All-Ireland champions, Cork, didn’t have a single forward amongst the best of the best while the team they beat in the final, Down, earned as many spots in the final selection as their betters that September.
Few, if any, punters were happy when the news of that 15 broke in the wider world but then that was just in keeping with the 12 or so angry men and one woman who did the choosing because not one person seemed to be completely happy with how things had transpired.
There were far more committed GAA people at those meetings than this one in 2010. There were certainly far better judges of what does and does not make a great season in Gaelic games and yet the whole thing is about as silly as a glass hammer.
Tyler Durden’s great line comes to mind here: If the first rule about Fight Club is that you don’t talk about Fight Club, then the first rule about the All-Stars selection is that you don’t talk about rules. We tried it two years ago and those hours ain’t ever coming back.
One discussion at the time — and I don’t think this is giving away the Third Secret of Fatima here — was about one player in particular who was named in one position Sunday after Sunday but operated in a completely different area of operations. Others played some games in one spot and others elsewhere.
Crisis! Where would they be picked? That’s the thing here: what criteria is there for selecting the country’s best if even those arbitrary lines displaying the lineouts on your match programme are completely out of whack with the new tactical realities Jimmy McGuinness and his contemporaries are concocting on these dark, wintry nights? Two years ago, the revelation that Cork had received only four places on the football side was decried and described as a slap in the face for the All-Ireland champions but, to these eyes, that seems a more reasonable number than the eight received by Donegal this week.
Seriously, eight of the best footballers in the entire island were from one of the 32 counties in 2012? And more to the point, are we really meant to believe that the best 15 players in the country all happened to play for the four semi-finalists and no-one else?
That is either a damned weird quirk of fate or maybe it’s just nonsensical but, like we said, that’s the beauty of the All-Stars: the one thing we can all agree on is to disagree.
