Larry Ryan: This looks like being the year of controvassy
FARRAGO: Katie Taylor has been denied the right to box in Croke Park. Pic: Gareth Fuller/PA Wire
Gaelic football might have got in first, but this weekend represents the traditional start of the Irish sporting year. The Six Nations and the hurling getting underway at the same time. The yin and yang. A balanced diet. Perfect complements. No need to read into one, every moment of profound importance in the other. Nothing to be learned and no end of learnings. One with a trophy for nearly everyone, the other where nobody wants to win anything.
From here, the year should proceed along established lines. The League of Ireland crowd will ride in, on high horses. ‘The Irish’ will raid Cheltenham. The hurling will restart proper, after these controlled doses, in a welter of savage hunger. The football will meander along, Kerry pleading for a test.
Except you can sense this isn’t going to be a normal year. They are calling it the year of the rabbit but I think we already know this is going to be the year of controvassy. A year of festering disputes and rows rumbling on. A year when Joe Duffy will earn his corn.
There’s an appetite out there for outrage. We’re currently nursing two at the same time, which is stretching capacity. A club final that would have been forgotten instantly is still the talk of the land. While a national hero has now been denied all our birthrights — to box in a GAA stadium. The only similarity in these two scenarios is the conclusion drawn that the GAA is an absolute disgrace.
It is another of the great services the GAA provides. That it is always there, big and solid enough to sustain anything thrown at it, a constant to rail against. Like the weather. A punchbag to take the heat off the FAI every now and again.
In the 16th man farrago, the GAA is castigated for not rushing to judgment, for accepting the referee’s decision. But as TJ Ryan pointed out on this week’s hurling podcast, what’s the difference really between this officiating mistake and a point waved wrongly wide? We’d have a bumper year of hearings and appeals in store if every grievance was automatically investigated.
In the case of Katie, you suspect the current hullaballoo might just be a convenient newsline to sell a few more tickets, down the line, for folk who were a little concerned about shifting 80,000 of them.
But even when a dispute appears to be about putting more money in a lad like Eddie Hearn’s pocket, it is the GAA, naturally, which is widely deemed at fault. And no doubt it will be at fault many more times before this sporting year is out. You sense it will not be alone.
Where will this take us next, this current thirst for aggravation? This Netflix deal is promising. Surely somebody will be able to produce leaked footage of gross betrayals of rugby values over the coming weeks. Chit-chat while the kicker is going through his routine maybe. Or Gats smirking when Johnny pulls one wide. They will write a play about that relationship yet.
During the hurling league, we’re probably as likely to see some county surreptitiously take to the field with 14 players as 16. Maybe it will become the new ‘training on the morning of the game’, taking a lad off but putting nobody on.
We have Davy Fitz back too, remember, in case things ever settle down for a moment. While the dangerous force of banter will, no doubt, claim its customary victim or two.
And so protective are we of young Evan, there could be another Cuisine de France boycott if anything happens to him against Didier Deschamps’ boys.
You have to expect too that the extraordinary work of Enoch to inspire copycats come championship. Might we see another 16th man loiter uninvited in a small parallelogram until word comes through of an injunction against a suspension?
There’s another reason why this Irish sporting year may pan out a little differently. A Women’s World Cup should change the shape of many things.
We previewed a new order this week with Katie McCabe involved in arguably the most high-profile Irish saga of the transfer window. The Ireland captain threatened to become her generation’s Frank Stapleton in controversially switching between two traditional English powers.
Arsenal shut that down, despite talk of a record fee. In the end, McCabe wasn’t even the biggest story of Deadline Day, overtaken by Arsenal’s pursuit of Manchester United’s England striker Alessia Russo, though that one didn’t get across the line either.
On Sky Sports’ Deadline Day coverage, England international Lianne Sanderson was almost tearful at this new dynamic. “It makes me so happy… to see figures like half a million pounds talked about.”
That’s the interesting place women’s football finds itself in. The feelgood factor of women finally getting their due lends an innocence to these shows of financial might from the bigger clubs, like when we marvelled at Trevor Francis becoming the first million-pound player.
But is what happened since to men’s football the best model to follow?
Kelly Simmons, the FA Women’s professional game director, isn’t sure.
“It’s the biggest conundrum... You want women to earn to their full potential. No one’s clipping the wings of male players, but you want the league to be sustainable and all the clubs are saying: ‘As this grows, how are we going to learn lessons from the men’s game and put cost controls in?’ ”
Analysts suggest that on current trajectory, the first female million-pound player will be along in the next year or so. Should we regard that as a cause for celebration? Or a warning sign?
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