Hurling’s green shoots of recovery

It’s been widely argued that the greatest obstacle to the growth of hurling is the GAA’s other major sport, gaelic football. Yesterday in Croke Park the National Hurling Development Plan was launched, a multi-phased strategy that also includes the growth and promotion of camogie — the battleground? Gaelic football’s heartlands.

All those counties north of a line drawn from Galway more or less to the northern tip of county Wexford, with another ‘mission’ headed for Kerry.

The main man behind the plan is GAA president-elect Liam O’Neill, though he didn’t present it in those stark terms, especially not given his position.

“We never discussed football once and that is not being political about it,” he claimed.

A classic case of avoiding the elephant in the room then? No, says Liam, “You know what we did — we went around the elephant and fixed it. The elephant doesn’t matter now because the elephant is side-stepped.”

And indeed that is so, for the moment. The plan introduces a comprehensive 60-team 13-county club league involving all Ulster counties plus two each from Connacht and Leinster, 13 counties where — Antrim apart — football is by far the more powerful game.

Those league games will be all done and dusted by mid-April, while the Christy Ring, Lory Meagher and Nicky Rackard Cups for the ‘developing’ counties (‘weaker counties’ is now a term verboten), will all be completed by the first Sunday in June to avoid a real head-to-head with football across the months that matter most in hurling.

Side-stepping the elephant then, but what happens when those hurlers want to play at the height of the GAA season? That’s a problem for down the road, says Liam.

“Our part ends in June but the whole summer is there for counties to organise their own county leagues and county championships, as they are doing now anyway.

“We have provided a platform where players are ready for hurling and are ’souped’ up for it, but we can’t control everything, we can only set out the conditions to allow hurling to develop.”

The new plan isn’t aimed just at the developing counties, however. There is also a Grassroots to National programme which has three key progressive elements — Child, ‘Play to learn’; Youth, ‘Learn to compete’; Adult, ‘Compete to win’, and this will be implemented nationwide.

In addition, there is a new National Hurling and Camogie Development Centre (NHCDC) based in the Carriganore Campus in WIT, where a number of programmes will be undertaken.

A side element of the work done by the NHCDC — and a follow-up to a recommendation from the 2002 Strategic Review — is that the Hurling Development Committee has chosen six counties (Antrim, Laois, Carlow, Westmeath, Kerry and Down) with the aim that one of them will contest an All-Ireland senior hurling semi-final within 10 years.

The new centre in WIT will work with those counties in a number of areas, including strength and conditioning, diet and nutrition, player performance analysis, with a new Mobile Unit capable of taking that expertise on the road.

All in all then a very ambitious plan, but a plan that leans far more towards the practical than the notional. With so many counties coming from such a poor base, progress will be slow but, says GAA Director of Games Pat Daly, “Progress can be measured in a number of different ways. The quantitative measure is how many people are playing; qualitatively you can see at what level they are playing. Last week we saw Loughgiel [Antrim] beating the Munster champions [Na Piarsaigh, club senior hurling semi-final], we saw Mount Leinster Rangers [Carlow] winning an All-Ireland intermediate championship against an Armagh team [Middletown].

“Whatever way you look at it, that’s progress, that teams from those counties are contesting finals. That’s happening because there’s a lot of good, hard work going on. We are creating a mechanism whereby anyone can play hurling regardless of where they are born. I went to college with a lot of people in Dublin who had never seen a hurley because it was an alien game — we’re trying to take that away, we’re trying to ensure that every kid in Ireland gets an opportunity to play hurling. That would be a massive turnaround from where it was 20 years ago.”

Back to that elephant? The fact is hurling and football are competing for the hearts and minds of exactly the same constituents.

If this plan works and hurling does start to grow, football devotees — understandably — will defend ‘their’ territory. The time will come when the elephant can no longer be side-stepped. In the meantime, however, for hurling supporters, this does represent a leap forward.