GAA must wrest control in order to effect true change
Just when you think the GAA is seeing out the clock until the festive holidays, they go and release the first half of the Football Review Committee’s findings and generate page upon page of media coverage in their deepest off-season.
Respect.
As a journalist, there are few more dispiriting sights than that of a report laden with statistics, findings and suppositions — you should see some of the A4 blocks the crime and politics correspondents have foisted upon their desks — but the FRC managed to pack a proper punch in just 12, thought-provoking pages.
The FRC may be an independent committee — and everyone made great play about that earlier this week — but it is one brought to life through the urgings of GAA president Liam O’Neill who has also spoken about his desire for the Management Committee and Central Council to take more proactive roles in the formation of legislation.
This is interesting stuff.
The GAA prides itself, understandably, on its tradition as a democratic organisation but change has often been stifled by sections of the association that don’t necessarily share the views and hopes and dreams of those who are earning salaries in Croke Park, and further tete-a-tetes are all but inevitable in the next few months and, indeed, years.
Chuck Tanner, a former baseball player and manager, was the big chief in the Chicago White Sox’s dugout back in the early 1970s when he told a story about a meeting he had with league president, Lee McPhail, to discuss a new playing rule.
“He told us we liked it,” said Tanner.
O’Neill and Paraic Duffy, the GAA’s Director General, can only dream of such powers. Three years ago, inter-county managers kicked up an awful stink about the experimental ‘yellow card and you’re off’ idea and it subsequently fell short of the required two-thirds majority at Congress by just eight, measly votes.
What tends to be forgotten is that a GPA poll held shortly before that year’s AGM in Cork found that 82% of players were against the move being made permanent as well. But Congress is well capable of rejecting change without need of a nudge so it will be interesting to see if it goes with the flow in Derry next April or seeks to hold back the tide.
Congress is dismissed as an awful bore, a day-long administrative stock-take interrupted only by a three-course lunch and the odd motion capable of stirring the blood, but it is much more than that. It is a battleground where a two-speed association wrangles over whether to accelerate into the fast lane or take the next exit and saunter through the back roads.
For one day each year, the rank-and-file’s representatives congregate to plot that course, each delegate a Caesar in his or her own right, and it is inevitable that some of the FRC’s motions will be given the thumbs up and others the thumbs down in 2013.
In fact, a betting man would say the more revolutionary motions will again be shot down.
This will be the third time in less than 10 years that Congress has been asked to debate sweeping new rules for its billboard games and you have to wonder how long it can keep its finger in that particular dyke because, as Donegal’s Michael Murphy noted yesterday, the persistence shown by those in HQ speaks volumes for their desire for change on the field.
It took Sean Kelly a lot of time, effort and patience to have Croke Park opened for rugby and soccer but get it open he did, and it is easy to detect a similar air of stubbornness and purpose enveloping the offices in Croke Park in recent months. You wonder, too, how long the GAA can continue to make small talk and avoid the great, big elephant in the room.
Other organisations, the IRFU and FAI among them, have in recent times reduced to impotency committees and boards manned by volunteers that had wielded enormous administrative powers for more than 100 years but the GAA continues to run its affairs on a model with no contemporary in the world of sports. In the last 21 years, the association has accepted shirt sponsorship, rebuilt Croke Park, opened it up to rugby, soccer and corporate boxes, ended the ban on members of the British security forces, struck the TV revenue jackpot, embraced commercial partnerships and much more besides.
Congress balked at a lot of that before finally giving the green light but you have to wonder how much longer an organisation so professional in so many ways — with at least one obvious exception — can continue to tip its hat to the masses in such an admirable but inherently flawed manner.
Contact: brendan.obrien@examiner.ie
Twitter: @Rackob
