Kieran Shannon: Are you ready? It’s time to embrace the GAA’s new normal
Cork’s Patrick Horgan in action against Limerick duo Tom Morrissey and Gearóid Hegarty in the All-Ireland SHC final at Croke Park last August. The Championship comes back around in April. Picture: Ray McManus/Sportsfile
Remember club month? How April 1 was meant to signify four weeks of next to no inter-county activity only for it to make a fool out of some folk and everyone else just outright cranky, giving out about how out of touch Croke Park were with the grassroots, how the county game had become a behemoth, or how long a layoff their county had between league and championship?
Now, hallelujah, in the year of our Lord and David Clifford 2022, there is no such acrimony. No more CPA versus GPA, or club versus county, or 10-week layoffs with teams killing time and thus themselves, being subjected or subjecting themselves to another torturous pre-season. No more April being neither one thing nor the other, a doldrums, a no more no-man’s land with its phoney wars and endless challenge game circuits. Easter Sunday, instead of being a day to blow out some dirty petrol that Darragh used to talk about, is now the Indianapolis 500: try handing out – or at least getting – tickets when Cork and Limerick bolt from the starting line in the Páirc and Tipp come to Walsh Park. April now means championship. April is the new May.
