Donal Óg Cusack: Inter-county player is not the enemy of club player

There were some grenades thrown at the GPA from the top table at the Club Players Association launch — and that’s fine. Whatever attracts attention should be used when trying to get something off the ground, writes Donal Óg Cusack.

First I would like to welcome the Club Players Association into existence. I wish it well.

Recently it has become fashionable to drive wedges between GAA players who play at county level and their comrades in the clubs. I appreciate that the very existence of the GPA made this easier for some people.

We need to accept though that the GAA’s health depends on a whole range of elements, one of which is providing an outlet for players who want to test themselves at the elite level. The GAA is a great and necessary part of Irish culture. Of all our sports the GAA best represents the breadth and depth of Irish society. The GPA has always wanted to enhance and contribute to this.

One of the great challenges for the GAA is to keep most of the people happy most of the time. I am and always will be proud of what the GPA has achieved from a very uncertain start. Some pundits make a good living running down everything that happens in the GAA and inter-county players have shipped a lot of criticism over the past few years for reasons which escape me.

When the GPA was founded few people understood that our inter-county players were very poorly treated in terms of the effort they put into the games, the sacrifices they made in terms of their own careers and the profile and revenue which they brought to the GAA. Profile and revenue may be ugly modern words but they are a big part of what keeps the GAA modern, well-funded and able to support an extraordinary network of clubs in communities throughout the country.

Without profile, without those revenues, we will lose ground quickly. The GAA needs to create great heroes and great events to lodge our games into the imaginations of young people. Rugby has done an incredible job in this regard. A while ago, the IRFU put out an advertising campaign which boldly proclaimed Ireland to be ‘Rugby Country.’ Twenty years ago we would have laughed. But rugby has broadened its social structure, sold itself cleverly and generously and has produced a generation of players who are at ease telling their stories to the media.

The GAA is under pressure and we need to move forward decisively. The GPA’s inception was a recognition of the fact that the GAA needs to provide a stream of activity for players who want to see how far they can take their skills and fitness. There is huge enjoyment in that journey for players and fans.

However, the cost to the career, education and personal life for a top level player can be high. And when a player retires or gets shunted into the sidings he can feel slightly bereaved. There is nothing there except memories and a lot of catching up to do in the real world. I am very proud that the GPA has changed that for players.

Despite the lazy slur from critics, the GPA has never been about all-out professionalism. That idea is unsustainable and would kill the Association stone dead in 10 years. What the GPA (and the GAA) have built is a platform where players can push themselves to their limits within Gaelic games with support for their education, careers and help in dealing with domestic and personal challenges. Players can access help through their careers and in the often difficult transition into retirement. They grow during their careers and are equipped to contribute as leaders in their communities and their clubs. We need to be more proactive about selling this strand of the GAA experience.

The GPA faced almost every challenge except popularity but we have made huge progress and the GPA has found its place within the Association. There were some grenades thrown at the GPA from the top table at the CPA’s launch recently. I didn’t feel offended. Whatever attracts attention should be used when trying to get something off the ground. The CPA wasn’t going to get anywhere by announcing that all was rosy in the garden but…

The inter-county player is NOT the enemy of the club player. Never has been and never will be. How could he be? All inter-county players are club players. To go down this path would be strategically wrong for the CPA. It is the wrong fight. Inter-county players needed their interests to be looked after. Hence the GPA. That is the sole remit. It doesn’t mean that those players are no longer club players. Some of the most fiercely dedicated and passionate club men I know are leading figures in the GPA.

For me, training teams in Cloyne during my inter-county career and since I retired has been one of the greatest joys. The club is where I started and where I will finish. Ask a Tony Kelly or a Diarmuid Connolly and I bet they will tell you the same thing. The GPA has always recognised the problems within the GAA’s calendar. The schedule effects everybody. A more compact season and a better training to games ratio would suit everybody. As Dermot Earley pointed out when welcoming the CPA, there is a fixture mess that needs to be addressed and this is another voice at the table.

That table is a tough place though. It is not easy to get your voice heard. Before the GPA, inter-county players had no formal representation. So we filled a void. Club players are represented, for better or worse, by their clubs. Clubs feed into the county board who feed into their provincial council and so onto the minefield of Congress. That is a dense forest of GAA democracy.

Change is tough. Well-intentioned motions get passed by individual clubs but often perish somewhere between the club hall and Congress.

It is easier to introduce something brand new to the GAA than to change something already in existence. We do things the way they always have been done. Did Croke Park come up with additional post-provincial championship rounds of the football championship because they think it is a fine thing? No. Any attempt to tamper with the provincial championships would end in bloodshed.

Croke Park has produced a proposal for compacting the inter-county season and playing the club championships within a calendar year. It will be a tough sell. The last thing to change within GAA will be all the little outposts of power and influence. That is the great challenge the club players face. There are other considerations as well, not just about dates and compact schedules. Páraic Duffy’s recent document was merely a template that proposed the All-Ireland finals being played in August allowing September as a club month. This is welcome but there is a flag in there for hurling people. The proposal bloats the football championship with eight more competitive matches while leaving an emaciated and lob-sided hurling championship to be run off quickly.

According to Appendix 7 of the proposal document, there would have been just two games of inter-county hurling played after July 17 in 2016. My understanding is that this was just a sample schedule and doesn’t aim to define what games are played when, other than stipulate that they must finish in August.

This being the case there is no reason why, on alternate years, the All-Ireland hurling final shouldn’t be played as the last major event of the inter-county calendar. Or why the hurling structure shouldn’t be re-examined too. The hurling voice needs to be heard on this.

I hope that the CPA’s counter-proposal on the scheduling and competition issues will place the development and promotion of hurling at the top of the list of priorities. The idea of playing the All-Ireland finals in August is new but we shouldn’t be afraid of that. It is holiday time and kids are off school.

It is the best time of the year to showcase the games.

It would be progressive to see events like the Munster and Leinster Club Hurling championships being played in late August and September when the pitches are good.

An All-Ireland club finals weekend to round off the GAA year with a celebration at Croke Park in late November or early December would work too.

We can learn from the rugby example here. “Marketing the product” is an unromantic phrase but we have to be more aggressive.

The games, especially hurling, need to be sold.

The club game needs a huge shot in the arm to remind people how great it can be. Rugby folk conjured up the Heineken Cup.

Through marketing, we came to believe that this was an ancient and venerable competition, a holy grail.

Then it whisked the Heineken Cup away and marketed a new format.

The GAA is great but we must continue to watch and learn…

Twitter: @donalogc