Cork GAA proposal: A four-point plan to recognise the countyman

It is a small curiosity that the same solution has been proposed for more or less all of the great, intractable sporting problems of our time. Four points for a win. They have all come around to believing in the old Four Points Good, Two Points Bad tenet, at some stage.

The League of Ireland tried it, in 1981, in one of the many schemes employed to coax people to watch it. Four points for an away win and two for an away draw were to be incentives for attacking football ‘on the road’.

Though the initiative was arguably foiled by the glass half full optimism of those managers who considered two points a more than adequate reward for defensive football on the road.

Rugby brought in the magical four points, of course, and even threw in a bonus fifth, in its efforts to smarten up the inherent ugliness of the spectacle. To impose some discouragement on the arm wrestling and up the jumper stuff and incentivise the pinning back of ears.

You could make the case that it worked, given the sport’s modern rise, though no link has yet been established between tolerance of rugby and the entertainment on offer. And now, four points for a win is a key pillar in Cork GAA’s solution to the most enduring sporting conundrum of them all — club v county.

There is a wider significance to this solution, naturally, beyond the nuts and bolts of the solution itself. Crucially, it’s a declaration that Cork is now in the solutions business, instead of the problems business, with which they have become quite closely linked.

It is a signal that Cork is open to ideas, to innovation. That Cork is looking forward when they might have become associated with looking in other directions, such as backwards. As such, a certain amount of local and national outrage at the details of the solution could be seen as a small price to pay.

To summarise this solution, Cork is set to take haven in the first refuge of all championship reformists, the round-robin. But with a notable twist: One of the three options put to clubs this week is a five-match format in which they would be asked to play twice without their Cork players.

To sweeten this bitter pill, the matches without countymen will have a hardly-worth-your-while two points up for grabs. While the dances with stars will be ramped up into seductive four-pointers, or ‘proverbial eight-pointers’ once things get down to the business end.

As you might expect, this gambit has been considered calmly across social media, provoking verdicts including “the final nail in the coffin for club GAA” and “one of the worst moves the GAA has ever seen”.

And our deep-rooted and well-founded national suspicion of any initiative on the basis that it is likely to be a trojan horse for worse medicine to come has been in evidence in the popular description of the Cork plan as ‘the thin end of the wedge’.

There is a great fear out there that a day will soon dawn when the countyman is never ‘released back to the club’, that he will be forever held in captivity, an indentured martyr to The Sacrifices and The Demands, banged up on training jaunts to Alicante or Fota while the real stuff is going on between Dripsey and Milford out in Kilbrin.

It is club GAA’s ‘empty nest syndrome’; an instinctive horror at the idea the countyman might grow up and move out of home and concentrate on playing matches better suited to his standard.

What is the point of a club developing top players if they don’t play for them, goes the refrain, repeated many times this week. As if this isn’t the natural circle of life for every grassroots club in every other sport in the world.

Mind you, there is an important distinction between the GAA and most other grassroots sport: people are willing to pay to see club championships. You could put that down to tradition and community and pride in the parish. But it is more likely about the countyman.

For a people sunburned by star wattage, club championship matches are an opportunity to marvel at the countyman, to touch the countyman, to safari these magnificent creatures as they roam the wild.

And to see if the countyman suffers a twinge that might keep him out for the county. It is a platform to abuse and goad the other crowd’s countyman, and to remind him he wasn’t so smart last Sunday against Cian Lynch or David Clifford.

It is a chance to scorn the countyman held scoreless from play. And to confirm which countyman was never a good clubman anyway. For mentors, there is the excitement of organising deputations to the homes of the countyman the Tuesday before, to placate him.

And for referees, there is an opportunity to showcase their common sense by letting the countyman off with a yellow card. Or to make a name for themselves by sending off the countyman.

He offers something for everyone and it is easy to see why the countyman shuts down the club summer. And since we must always be aware of unintended consequences with these four-point proposals, Cork’s plan may even be a useful first step towards placing a metric on the value of the countyman, assessing him to be twice as important to the association as the clubman.

It might even go a little bit further if, as has been suggested, it will be cheaper to attend matches without countymen. A monetary value on a countyman’s contribution to the takings at a club game — that’s a number which may interest the GPA down the line.