Big ball cynics have turned me off big time

THE Mayo and Donegal supporters, bedecked in their county colours, streaming towards Croke Park for Sunday’s NFL division 1 final were met by an unusual sight — streams of supporters, also colour-bedecked, heading away from the same venue.

The All-Ireland colleges A hurling final was the first game in a Croke Park triple-header, started at 12.45, finished at about 2pm, was followed by the colleges A football final, with the NFL decider as the icing on the cake — this was the thinking, at any rate.

By 2pm, however, many of the hurling supporters of both Kilkenny CBS and De La Salle Waterford had seen enough, and they left in droves, headed south.

The reason I know this?

Having sorted a few after-match quotes, I was with them, all the way.

In the last few years I’ve been known to pass the occasional snide remark about Gaelic football. “Are you doing anything on today’s football game?” – “No, I only cover sport.” Or, to quote a Tony Considine line: “If the NFL final was on in my back-garden I’d close the curtains.”

Lately, the line is that with basketball, soccer and rugby, there are already enough sports to cater for those who want to play a big-ball game in this country, so why should the GAA promote one more, especially one as displeasing to the eye as gaelic football.

All of the above is said tongue-in-cheek, but the truth is that, like the hundreds who voted with their feet in Croke Park last Sunday, I have gone off gaelic football, big-time.

There was a time I followed football with almost as much interest as I followed hurling, when the exploits of the likes of Mick O’Connell, Mick O’Dwyer, long-kicking Donie O’Sullivan, Mick Burke, Declan Barron, Red Collier, Paddy McCormack, Tony McTague, the magnificent Galway three-in-a-row side, all held me in thrall.

These guys played a game you could relate to, a big honest manly game, lots of skills and thrills.

The current game? At its best it’s still good, but it’s seldom at it’s best; what we’re usually presented with is a spectacle of fouls, awful, atrocious, mean-spirited, with some of soccer’s worst excesses now being introduced — feigning injury to get an opponent into trouble, that sort of nauseating nonsense.

Something has to be done about this game, and soon. At the moment, at the top, it’s a blight on the GAA, a shabby excuse for a sport. Re-introduce the sin-bin, and use it; come down hard on the cynics, the jersey-pullers, the late-hitters, the off-the-ball skullduggery.

Introduce the concept of team fouls, so effective in basketball, where after a defined number of team fouls — say ten, for starters — every subsequent free is awarded on the 20m line dead straight in front of the goals.

Stop trying to treat hurling and football as if they’re identical sports — they’re not — and introduce defined fouls and subsequent penalties unique to football, on the simple logic that many of its problems are unique to football.

I know there are still teams out there who want to play this game the way it’s meant to be played, I know there are top coaches as frustrated as myself at the way things are going. Those teams and those coaches realise, however, that if you don’t join the cynics, you won’t beat them.

As of a few years ago, I have no real interest in Gaelic football anymore.

A bit like the Premiership in England, after it sold its soul to television, I have turned off. I’ll be keeping just a watching brief on Billy Morgan and his Cork charges, but unless and until there are major changes to the rules of the game, in the way the sport is governed, I won’t be tuning back in any time soon.