Galway executive hold all the aces
Why else, pray tell, would the players be so obliging? Like Mayo’s footballers, they too have reached two All-Ireland finals in the last four seasons but, in stark contrast to their fellow bridesmaid neighbours, Mayo weren’t willing to hear anyone out. With a brother of Noel Connelly as county chairman and their liaison officer, it was unlikely they would reach an outcome reasonable to them via arbitration, but then family ties between officialdom and management are almost as entwined in Galway.
The Mayo squad’s show of strength in MacHale Park on the night of October 1 was a page right out of the Cork hurlers’ strike book in January 2009, when they appeared en masse in front of the media in the Maryborough Hotel. In both situations, the players were expressing their unity. A chain only being as strong as its weakest link and all that.
The problem for Galway’s hurlers is that they are not politicians, whereas some in the management committee are. They may only have demonstrated the faintest sense of diplomacy, but that’s all that officials needed to spin this episode into something different. What was once a story about a panel of players opposing an executive-backed manager has now become one about a panel of players sitting down to explain themselves to those same executive members. As is so often the case when you’re doing that you’re losing.
No longer is it the players versus Cunningham and board executive, but the players versus Cunningham, with the executive having neatly removed themselves from the line of fire. As the statement issued by Galway GAA CEO John Hynes on behalf of the management committee last week read: “The Committee is cognisant of the views of both sides and wishes to ensure that Galway has a cohesive and harmonious panel for 2016, based on the positive progress and achievements of the past year.”
In the following paragraph, it was confirmed an independent mediator would be sought to resolve the impasse. Such developments usually only go one way, a direction that doesn’t bode well for Cunningham, but officials can now claim they did all they could to make peace. For them, it’s now a face-saving mission. The controversy, because the players have allowed the county board to dictate the terms, has become more about how it looks than how it feels. That there is still the possibility of Cunningham retaining his position is incredible, considering just how many of the panel wanted him removed.
How did it come to this? The longer the impasse has run, the further away officials are from last month’s hurling board meetings, when they were so bullheadedly determined to see Cunningham ratified next year, regardless of the players’ opposition to him, which they expressed to the manager that same weekend. Any right-minded club delegate should have a multitude of questions ready to pose to the top table at the next meeting. Alarm bells should have been ringing when a meeting of the hurling board was called 24 hours after the initial gathering, when the executive’s proposal to ratify Cunningham was blocked as the manager wasn’t in attendance.
If, as it was circulated to media earlier this month quoting an unnamed county board source, Cunningham really did offer his resignation after the players spoke to him then why now is he so determined to hang on?
It doesn’t tally and the claim contradicts the assertion from the other side.
As much as they should know what is going on, the players have to appreciate what is at stake. The week before last, we spoke to an accomplished mediator with a strong GAA pedigree about the current stalemate. He wouldn’t go on record, but maintained that “it’s important both sides are heard”. An obvious point, you might think, but the repercussions of this fall-out are just as serious on the players’ side as on Cunningham’s.
If the more seasoned panel members don’t feel that what they are doing may well spell the end of their Galway careers, irrespective of who is the manager next year, then they are very much mistaken.
It’s a game of high risks, a survival of the fittest, and now that Ireland’s Rugby World Cup campaign has ended, the spotlight will move back to Galway, where the narrative has changed from earlier this month.
It’s a game neither Cunningham nor the players are winning. The executive, though? It’s their deck and they are dealing.
Healy brings experience to Cork job
As low-key appointments go, Peadar Healy’s will take a lot of beating.
But what Healy provides is knowledge of the inter-county game, six seasons of it with Conor Counihan. With O’Donovan Rossa and Dr Crokes, he’s hardly been sitting on his hands in the meantime either. In ways, his is an appointment similar to Counihan who had cut his teeth as a selector under Billy Morgan.
Healy may not be John Cleary, so appreciated by the players because of his U21 exploits, but then Cleary ruled himself out.
However, like Cleary, he has an attachment to the county’s traditional football hotbed in the west that will appeal to the team’s most fervent of fans from there. The recruitment of Conor McCarthy and Morgan O’Sullivan lend to that focus in the region while Paudie Kissane is a shrewd and, let’s be honest, high-time appointment as strength and conditioning coach.
In today’s edition, he speaks about retaining Division 1 status next season. For a county that has enjoyed the league almost as much as All-Ireland champions Dublin these last five seasons, it sounds the most modest of goals but he’ll appreciate supporters, including the disaffected ones, are too wise now to be convinced by good spring tidings.
Decision was the finest act of ecumenicalism in quite some time
The joint decision by Clonkill and Raharney not to field teams in Sunday’s Westmeath minor hurling final was possibly the finest act of Gaelic games ecumenicalism in quite some time.
Their stance was downright logical and right considering several of the teenagers were playing in the senior decider between the teams later that afternoon in Mullingar. At the heart of the matter was a player welfare issue, which the clubs admirably couldn’t sit idly by and ignore.
County chairman Sean Sheridan insisted the board were only acting on a mandate from last December’s annual convention, that both finals had to be played on the same day. This unfortunate and completely avoidable episode will do nothing to dissuade the theory held by hurling folk in the county that the board on occasion can do more to show it cares about the smaller ball game.
Email: john.fogarty@examiner.ie
