Not everyone grasps realities of GAA life

Sometimes everything aligns nicely and offers you a way of seeing how the world works.

For instance, last Thursday’s Irish Examiner was an intriguing snapshot of where the GAA is right now.

Let me walk you through it.

The main piece on the front page of the sports section by John Fogarty was headlined, “Déise halt training as board puts clubs first,”; below that was an Eoghan Cormican piece — “Devenney blasts GAA for ‘abandoning’ club players and weaker counties”.

You get the gist – the perceived disconnect between the grassroots of the Association and the elite writ large, with the Waterford County Board cancelling weeks of inter-county training to facilitate their clubs in the early rounds of the county championship.

Former Donegal star Brendan Devenney’s dissatisfaction with the huge focus on the inter-county game chimed nicely with that perspective, as did his concerns about Dublin becoming a GAA superpower.

Arise, GAA clubs of Ireland, and throw off your chains.

But further inside the sports section complications arose.

For instance, Kerry star Colm Cooper was quoted extensively by John Fogarty in a piece which, again, was summed up neatly by its headline: “Cooper thankful for Crokes’ strength amid rural club decline.”

The Kerry star instanced small rural clubs in south Kerry struggling for playing numbers in comparison to his club, Killarney-based Dr Crokes, but that struggle isn’t due to the demands of the intercounty game, but because of emigration and economics.

The inter-county game can be an easy target for the dissatisfied within the GAA, and often there’s ample reason for their unhappiness; also referred to last Thursday in the Examiner was former Donegal player Kevin Cassidy, who was furious that club games in the county were put off (“Club players in Donegal told once again by Senior team management to put away your boots”, he’d tweeted earlier in the week).

Beneath the Cooper interview there was another glimpse of the realities of GAA life in modern Ireland during a lengthy Fogarty interview with Cork’s Eoin Cadogan.

Cadogan senior referred in passing to his younger brother Alan lining out in an U21 city final for his club, Douglas, in between his U21 football commitments with the county side.

Yet player burnout is almost always linked to intercounty activity rather than club commitments, and that’s without getting into clubs which commit to providing – as they’re supposed to – a legitimate outlet in all Gaelic games.

The two Cadogans are dual players at county level, but how many players around the country have an opportunity to play both codes? The item which tied all of these concerns together, though, was the smallest of all, a panel from Brendan O’Brien about an Irish Sports Council funding announcement.

GAA Director-General Paraic Duffy was quoted referring to an ESRI report stating the GAA loses more players between 18 and 22 than other sports.

The GAA and the ESRI have a bit of history when it comes to participation studies, going back to the Sporting Lives report of 2008, and Duffy batted away the issue when he said, rightly, that retaining players is an issue for all sports, not just the GAA.

The inter-connectedness of all those issues should be apparent to even the casual reader, though. Players drift away from the GAA because of uncertainty about fixture planning, among other reasons, but part of the reason there’s so much uncertainty about fixtures is that disproportionate power over fixtures of inter-county managers.

Yet as Brendan Devenney himself said in the Examiner on Thursday, elite county teams are what is driving the GAA: the very definition of a paradox, no?

Devenney also called on revenue from the Sky broadcasting deal to be redistributed to the clubs, which was an interesting proposal.

Just to set the above in a wider context, though, consider another headline from Thursday, though in a different paper.

IRFU chief executive Philip Browne was also at the ISC funding launch and discussed the new European rugby tournament – and what watching those games would cost Irish TV viewers.

The headline? “Fans had to take the hit to secure European competition – Browne.”