Galway big losers in Leinster’s culture of self-interest
There were all sorts of fine features within its pages, although most of us tended to gravitate towards the number of All-Ireland titles they intended to win in hurling and football in the years ahead.
And, in fairness, they haven’t done too badly on that front.The other obvious draw from a pure rubbernecking perspective was the bit about the “subliminal exploitation of Dublin’s unique sporting hue” by unnamed competitors. Why, whomever could they have meant? Leinster weren’t having any of it, of course, and a club spokesman duly pointed out the rugby boys had been wearing blue for, oh, something like 100 years by then.
What that storm in a tea/latte cup demonstrated again was the competitiveness of sports when it comes to the battle for hearts and minds and the situation in Dublin continues to ebb and flow even if the GAA boys have stolen a march in recent years with their domination of Gaelic football just when Leinster have been navigating their way through some transitional waters. Football, obviously, is a constant player, too. That jostling for space between the rugger and the Gah in the capital has been most obvious on the handful of days since when the pavements, buses and DARTs have been lined with the - regardless of what the colour blind Dublin county board seem to think - very different shades of blue worn by punters making their way to either Croke Park, the RDS or the Aviva.
Compare that to the desert the Galway hurlers exist in right now.
Those guys have played the grand total of three championship games at home in the last decade. Pat Lam’s Connacht have already chalked off five home games at the Sportsground in just the eight weeks since the latest rugby season started. Included in that have been momentous defeats of Ulster and Toulouse, and the momentum created under their Kiwi coach shows no sign of abating.
What a joke. The GAA really does itself no favours sometimes
— Brendan O'Brien (@byBrendanOBrien) October 26, 2016
Galway blocked from playing at home in Leinster Champ https://t.co/vpe6U8FTlW
Talk of a new stadium on the site of their current home, or a ground share with Galway United at a newly developed Terryland has long been mooted and, though Lam is constantly reeling off the names of all five counties in the province as evidence of the rugby family out west, it is Galway where the epicentre of this sporting hurricane is to be found. This is the sort of wider picture that the wise men on the Leinster Council either failed to consider when they decided again this week to veto the idea of Galway actually having a home game in the Leinster championship for the first time since their entry in 2009.
It may be a reversal of the policy that kept the Dublin footballers rooted to Croke Park for a decade of summers but it is just a different side to the same coin. Decisions are being made not on the basis of equality but on that of naked self-interest. It is a shameful and indefensible policy and one made more egregious by the parallel refusal to admit Galway’s underage sides into the Leinster tent.
But let’s keep to the Salthill debate for reasons of clarity.
If there was a ‘Easy Guide to Sports Administration’ then the business of alighting on a fair and reasonable competition structure would probably be page one, chapter one. Establishing a fair fixture list is the two-times tables of a job that, it shouldn’t be forgotten, is so often a time-consuming and thankless one that few are prepared to perform.
And as for the defence of the policy by the Council chairman? John Horan’s assertion some of the good folk in Leinster weren’t too keen on schlepping it out to Salthill was a point with which anyone who has wrestled with all those bloody roundabouts around the city could sympathise but it made for a ridiculous argument on every other, logical level. Not least because Leinster Championship matches have been played in Kerry and Antrim in recent years.
It also ignores the fact the Dublin footballers — bless ‘em — travelled almost three hours to play in Castlebar this spring, that Laois had a similar odyssey to make Enniskillen and that Wexford navigated the length of the Irish Sea coastline to face Antrim. And don’t get us started on London going to Leitrim or Roscommon to New York.
What is abundantly clear, if it wasn’t already with Dublin’s HQ tenancy, is that a level playing field is way down the list of priorities to those tasked with running the GAA in Leinster. That’s if it is on the agenda at all. The delegates and the system that allowed this to happen again have been roundly ridiculed and condemned and yet you could only say that they have actually got off lightly. With friends like that, Galway have no need for enemies.
brendan.obrien@examiner.ie Twitter: @Rackob
