Tommy Martin: While everyone else is sportspreading, the GAA has shrunk its borders
KINGS OF JULY: Oisin Conaty of Armagh is tackled by Cein Darcy of Galway during this year's All-Ireland SFC final. Photo by Ray McManus/Sportsfile
“I like chips and egg on a Tuesday,” says Shirley Valentine’s husband Joe in the eponymous tale of middle-aged yearning. “It’s Thursday. Where’s me steak?” It feels like that at this time of the year when the bit of the GAA calendar long reserved for the steak of All-Ireland finals is instead filled with the chips and egg of club championships and structural reform chatter.
As Joe is at pains to point out, there’s nothing wrong with the latter, but on a Tuesday, not on a Thursday. It might have escaped your notice that on this week, in olden days, media outlets would have been filled with colourful All-Ireland football final homecoming content – unguarded interviews with sozzled heroes, heartwarming vox pops with star-struck kids, tactical breakdowns of who-done-what on the podcast feeds.
Or it might have escaped your notice if columns like this one did not keep bringing it up. Indeed, there is almost as much coverage of the lack of All-Irelands in September as there once was of All-Irelands in September, evidence of the steak-on-a-Thursday effect on a mass level.
The third Sunday in September was the crescendo to the men’s intercounty campaign and it tumbled into October and All-Star season, essentially giving the GAA a ten-month billboard on which to sell its wares to the general public. Instead, those heroes, now well and truly sobered up, are plying their trade in the local milieu of the club game, which for the casual sports viewer, distracted by Premier League, pro rugby and Rory McIlroy’s travails, is the equivalent of being tucked up in boxes and packed away in the attic for the winter.
One diehard smallball fan of my acquaintance texted on the morning of the hurling final’s once-sacred day, having clicked on a popular national sports website to see what was filling the vacuum. “Top story. Live updates of Bohs and f---ing Rovers. On the first Sunday in September. FFS!!”. Until he and his ilk die off, there will never be a September when people don’t bring up that sense that the GAA, for all its good intentions, has messed with the proper order of things.
Not that it is alone. A football World Cup in November, Champions League games on a Thursday, a Lions tour that concludes in August – there seems to be no part of the diary that can’t have something inappropriate stuffed into it. The difference in these cases is that the various organisations involved are expanding outwards in search of sporting lebensraum, marching their troops across the vast steppe of calendar not yet conquered by complicated group stage formats.
The GAA, on the other hand, at least in its attention-grabbing inter-county form, has shrunk its borders. It has hauled its troops back to barracks, decommissioned its big guns, handed over contested territories to the noisy neighbours. It is an act of self-flagellation on a Matt Talbot level, purifying itself of elite vulgarity for the spiritual paradise of a healthy club scene.
The cost of all this has been well-documented by the Joe Bradshaws of the GAA commentariat, used to tucking into finer fare in September. It's not quite “go woke, go broke” but the association is paying the price in terms of reduced exposure and loss of commercial opportunities. Big Irish business, never seeing a rugby corporate box it doesn’t want its name on, will happily take its money elsewhere.
The other side of the split-season culture war points out the gains, in the wholesome form of a much better deal for club players, no longer enduring lives of Samuel Beckett-scripted futility awaiting championship action and getting to play most of their important games in that small window of the Irish calendar where the pitches do not resemble the aftermath of the Battle of the Somme.
And so on and so on, for the medium term at least, since Oasis were recently kind enough to inform the GAA public that the current Croke Park event calendar is set to continue.
This now familiar pitched battle aside, one of the chips and egg topics occupying the vacated All-Ireland agenda deserves more attention than most. The schemings of Jim Gavin’s Football Review Committee have received much more coverage than might have been the case had we still been engrossed in All-Ireland finals-related discourse.
Where once the match-ups and player profiles ahead of the big game would have dominated the column inches and airwaves, now the proposals of Genial Jim and his band of merry men are getting their due airing. And while the workings of a GAA committee might seem like dreary fare to be talking about instead of high-octane inter-county action, anyone who actually watched much of the most recent football championship might think we are better off.
The space since the conclusion of the championship season has afforded something of a consensus to form about the urgent need to reform Gaelic football, one that will be of no little help when it comes to getting change across the line. When Niall Moyna, an actual inter-county selector with Louth, can tell the that “the game itself is appalling…it’s probably the most boring game in the world to watch,” and have it seem like a perfectly reasonable position, then you know the mood is ripe for change.
The inter-county vacuum has allowed a good airing of the ideas put forward by the Gavin gang. These include four points for a goal and two for a point from outside a 40-metre arc, both teams keeping three players inside each 65, and other tinkering aimed at creating a faster moving game, such as the option to ‘solo and go’ when fouled.
By the time of the interprovincial trial matches next month, to be broadcast live on television, people should be engaged enough to have a view on the whole thing, lending popular support to any tough changes that will need to be rubber-stamped at a Special Congress on November 30th.
A more exciting and attractive form of Gaelic football blazing across the shortened inter-county season might even end up promoting the game as well as a few extra months in the limelight – even if you will always miss your steak on a Thursday.
