Savour the scent of summer while you can — for it won’t linger long
For those of us more in tune with the particular delights of Gaelic football and hurling, there is surely no more wondrous segment of the calendar than these few weeks in May between the league’s finale and the opening rounds of the championship.
It doesn’t matter how often our own lot disappoint, the championship stands unblemished in the mind’s eye, like those idealised childhood summers when the rain never fell and boredom with it. The difference is, of course, that we still get to feel those same childlike flutters as the years fly by.
This weekend it will be the streets of Carlow, Portlaoise, Cavan, Mullingar and Galway that funnel folk towards deeds both great and ghastly and it’s round about this time that the league just gone is fashioned to suit every individual’s own disposition. If you’re an optimist then you’ll be enthused if your county fared well through the spring. If they didn’t, well, t’was only the league after all. The opposite holds true for those of a more pessimistic bent, of course.
Yet hope’s fragile flame flickers somewhere within us all. It might be the fact that yer man, that big brute of a full-forward, is back from Stateside or from a year on the rip, or both. It might simply be your county’s presence in the ‘easier’ side of the draw or just the realisation that no-one else seems to be great shakes either this year.
Such anticipation, unchecked as it can be by reality, is a madness that grips sports nuts of all flavours at some point or other and one which makes the almost inevitable disappointment all the greater. As John Cleese’s character, John Stimpson memorably put it in the 1980s British film Clockwise: “I can take the despair. It’s the hope I can’t stand.”
Maybe that’s a good thing, then, that hope for so many of us around the country will be extinguished by mid-July, by which time half the counties involved in the football championship will have spilled out of both the provincial championships and All-Ireland qualifiers.
Gone. Finished. In eight, short weeks.
Last summer, 1.7 million people had no horse in the race for the football championship beyond the start of July. A week later and a further million were disenfranchised from proceedings for another season after the second round of All-Ireland qualifiers and that just two months after 10 teams had got the ball rolling in all four provinces.
There’s something seriously wrong about that. Forget for a minute the black hole of a debate about championship structures and tradition and let the fact that almost half this island’s population is reduced to the status of impartial observer after such a tiny window of involvement in the association’s biggest showpiece sink in.
The GAA has done a wonderful job in turning away from the ad hoc and frankly confrontational stance it once took to all things commercial in the last 20 years but its failure to address a situation whereby it voluntarily reduces its market share (horrible phrase, I know) with such alacrity is an own goal of huge proportions.
Because, let’s face it, the Allianz League rests in the shadow of every other sporting event with which it coincides, whether that be the English Premier League, the Six Nations, Heineken Cup or the US Masters, and the AIB Club Championships by their very nature can only ever hope to attract a niche market.
That leaves the championship. Summer.
The championship is where it is, where it has always been and where it always will be and you have to ask yourself if the GAA can continue to find favour with a Band-Aid structure and schedule that all but ostracises so many of its supporters from a personal stake for 10 months of the calendar year.
It simply has to be expanded, both in length and breadth, which brings us to those rabbit-hole debates about structures which make the one Alice fell down in Lewis Carroll’s tale appear tame and ordinary. So, enjoy the GAA’s own version of Wonderland while you can. God knows it won’t last long.
email: brendan.obrien@examiner.ie
Twitter: @Rackob
