No magic bullet in burnout debate
Examples? How long is a piece of string? If a tree falls in a wood and there is no-one around to hear it, does it still make a sound? And, an old Irish perennial: How do you even begin to go about drafting a GAA schedule that is all things to all men and women at club, college and inter-county levels?
Personally, we’ll take the piece of string any day of the week.
Even Dessie Farrell, the long-time head of the Gaelic Players Association (GPA) and a man whose day job requires him to think about hot potatoes like burnout and scheduling, doesn’t believe there is one all-encompassing answer to the GAA’s topic-du-jour.
“The debate will go on and I’m not convinced that we will come up with the solutions required,” Farrell said this week.
So, fair play to GAA general director Paraic Duffy, president Aogán O Fearghail and the rest of HQ’s top dogs at Croke Park for trying yet again to hammer out a solution to the greatest conundrum of them all in terms of Irish sport. The eleven-point discussion paper they published this week was the product of some of the association’s best minds.
Yet, leave aside the details for a second and consider the more pertinent point: that this was the ninth such report on burnout etc since 2004 tells us everything about just how intractable this problem is and how difficult it will be to even begin to comprehend a way forward beyond the current morass that is the masters fixture list.
What they are, in effect, attempting to manufacture is a magic bullet, but history tells us that they will be doing well to have any truly meaningful number of their proposals approved. Will members really agree to the elimination of those profitable replays? Will the U21 football championship actually be consigned to history and the minor altered?
In short, will anything significant really change for the better?
Duffy is a man with real vision, but he is a practical operator as well. He has to be. You don’t steer the good ship GAA from the bridge, you seek to inveigle it one imperceptible inch at a time in the direction you desire and hope that enough of the crew buy in. It is a torturous, thankless task and one that is unlikely to curry much favour on this particular journey.
The unpalatable fact is that this is an issue so complicated that the lot of the ordinary club player would likely continue to be one of exasperation even if all 11 of the latest proposals were somehow ushered in to the rule book by a GAA membership drunk on an unexpected and historic cocktail of peace, love and harmony.
How, for example, even with the freeing up of a number of extra weeks and the trimming of some competitions, would club players be guaranteed regular game time when the inter-county championships continue to be unstructured, unpredictable messes sticky-taped together by four provincial councils and the national nerve centre?
And anyway, is mid-December really the appropriate time to hold the club game’s blue riband All-Ireland hurling and football deciders? After all, no-one thinks it ideal when county finals or provincial championship contests are hugging the heart of the Christmas period and played on pitches that are either turgidly heavy or frozen solid.
Shouldn’t club players get to shine when the sun does, too?
Strip it all down and the reality is that the only way club players can hope to be afforded regular games at a time in the year when the summer is at its height is for the club and county games to be separated at the hip: i.e. no club games for county players. Only then would the vast majority of the playing population be released from the whims and needs of the few.
That will never happen. It can’t. Not in an association where terms such as ‘grass roots’, ‘volunteer’ and ‘participation’ are cherished principles and not just pat phrases to be bandied about. And therein is the nub of the entire issue: the GAA is an association, a community of people, held hostage by their own lofty and perfectly commendable ideals.
The solutions to all their problems are actually obvious, but each and every one is unthinkable.
Scrapping their provincial championships, perhaps by replacing them with four equal groupings, would solve their chaotic All-Ireland championship schedule overnight, but would also wipe away well over a century of tradition and undermine the ethos of local rivalries cemented over that time. Chances of that happening? Slim to none.
A rule effectively forbidding players from lining out for, say, more than two or three teams, hurling and/or football, in any one season would solve the burnout problem for a host of players, especially those up to the age of 21, with the stroke of a pen. It would also incur the wrath of thousands who see it as everyone’s right to play GAA where and when they want.
The GAA has basically become too big, too successful, for its own good which gives rise to that old chestnut about how maybe hurling and football should be administered independently of each other. Is that logical? Yes. Is it likely? Not on your life.
See you all back here for the same hand-wringing session again next year.
brendan.obrien@examiner.ie Twitter: @Rackob
London falls for gridiron
Last Sunday’s NFL game in London between the Kansas City Chiefs and Detroit Lions began beneath a blinding November sun and azure skies that imbued a sense of expectation among the 83,000-plus crowd that you might not have expected given the poor records of both sides this season.
The resulting game was less than sparkling, with the Chiefs running riot against the clueless Lions and more than one spectator taking in the spectacle live for the first time observed that it is a sport far more easily digestible on TV than from the stands.
At least a part of us doesn’t go along with that. Nothing can replace the vitality that comes with actually attending a live event and no sport can match American football for the relentlessness of its assault on all the senses before, during and after a game, even if the action itself is so intermittent.
In the past 12 months, this column has chowed down on cheese curds at Camp Randall Stadium in Wisconsin, tailgated outside Chicago’s Soldier Field for the visit of the Green Bay Packers, reported on Penn State and University of Central Florida at Croke Park and hailed the Chiefs at Wembley.
Each occasion has been memorable in its own way even if three of those games were blowouts. American football is not for everyone. Some shy away from the physicality, others scoff at the razzmatazz while more again wince at the macho culture and the suspicion that performance-enhancing drugs are an issue that is brushed under the carpet.
London, though, can’t get enough of it.
