Dónal Óg Cusack: History will judge Páraic Duffy well

I signed up as a member to the Club Players Association this week. I believe that the CPA is very much on the side of right when it comes to the fixtures issue. I also believe the interests of the GPA and the CPA are not mutually exclusive.

I was heavily involved in the early stages of the GPA and from that experience I would offer my club colleagues one bit of advice. It’s good to create some noise. It’s better to create that noise and then ignore it. Stir up the crowd but keep your eye on the ball.

The CPA can do a great service to the GAA if it helps to bring about a change in the way we organise things. Our games are under huge pressure due to the manner in which rugby has organised and sold itself.

Here we are, the most interesting, low-hanging fruit in the whole orchard of sports a kid might choose — and we can’t organise our fixtures properly. For some reason, we can’t get the positive media coverage that rugby commands. Maybe the GAA needs its own specialised channel but that’s for another day.

There was a suggestion recently that the Club Players Association is a body that Twitter gave birth to. So what? The interesting point is the potential of social media to further the cause of the CPA.

If the CPA is to win, it needs to stick to this single issue of fixtures and it needs to box clever. First, it is not news to Croke Park that the fixtures need overhauling. People have been saying that for as long as I can remember. The difficulty is that the GAA was created with a democratic structure that is not likely to vote itself out of existence any time soon.

That presents more of an opportunity than is first evident. There has been a lot of hot air this week about the GPA coming to the ‘Super 8s’ discussion late and people urging the CPA to call a strike. Many of those pundits are former players who most people only recognise from Reeling In The Years and the rest have a talent for generating hot air.

They’re grand to have with you in the morning when you are marching into battle because by the 11 o’clock coffee break they will have changed sides. They are reeds, just blowing whichever way the wind does. The same people who told the GPA not to be so militant back in the day now complain that the GPA isn’t militant enough.

When they had the opportunity, many of those former player pundits never had the liathróidí to set up the associations now in existence. As a cover, they now try to tell the present generation where they are going wrong! Thankfully, the modern day player understands fake news. To the GPA and CPA, my advice is to ignore them. They’re irrelevant spectators on your journey.

The GPA is not the enemy. Neither is the GAA and neither is Páraic Duffy for that matter. History will judge Páraic well. Long after the reeds have blown away he will be seen as the man who opened the door for radical change. The GAA’s structure is the main enemy. If the GPA had come out against the Super 8s at the very moment that the idea was conceived it would have made no difference. The GPA has not got the structure to influence clubs.

The CPA has that structure. At least it can have. I’m not sure about the membership size right now, but while 30,000 players ticking a box on their phones sounds impressive, it’s a level of commitment that might translate to a few thousand turning up for meetings, half of those agreeing on a motion and fewer still doing something about it. Remember the reeds!

That is no credible basis for calling a strike. Are junior players on the same wavelength as seniors? Are hurlers feeling the same as footballers? Are dual players happy enough with the number of games they get? Some players want the chance to give more commitment. Some want less commitment but more certainty about when it is needed.

Waving sticks won’t work. To me, the CPA needs to take a breath and formalise a proposal in very simple terms. Players should get this many games.

Players should only be allowed play on this many teams. We should have this many weekends of exclusive club activity, this many weekends of county and club activity and this many of exclusively county activity.

That needs to be legalled by those who know the arcane rules that decide if a motion is fit to make the journey all the way from clubhouse to congress.

Then the CPA needs to keep growing, keep getting players to press that button on the basis that those players will be required to go to one meeting.

Thousands of clubs should be presented with THE MOTION at club AGMs all down the country. Thousands more players should turn up at their clubs that night and vote their motion through.

You mandate the people who hold up the structure. Mandate them to change that structure.

It took a long time for the GPA to get recognised because when we came into existence, there was no natural place for us. We had to do a lot of kicking and screaming. I’m not against kicking and screaming if it has an end result.

Getting recognised or making a speech to Congress isn’t the endgame for the CPA. The structure of the GAA is open to a broadbased will to push through change. The people who want that change the most, the club players, have to organise towards the aim of getting out there and pushing the buttons to create change.

For what it is worth, I don’t think that the Super 8s is such a bad idea. People have been saying that we won’t have the likes of the Tipp footballers getting through to an All-Ireland semi-final once in a blue moon so that we can patronise them and tell ourselves that everything is fine. Will it harm the Tipp footballers if instead they get more matches against strong teams and take away that condensed experience?

I don’t think so.

If the Super 8s provide the games and spectacle that they promise, the consequence will be to make the provincial championships more redundant than ever before. That offers an opportunity to create something radical and push it through the GAA’s cumbersome democracy. Thank you Páraic.

Hopefully, similar change is on the way for hurling. That will get us all happily singing from the same sheet again. It’s an opportunity too good to ignore. So shut out the noise boys, don’t be rushed into bending like the reeds, keep driving with the recruitment and I wish you the very best.

Nobody ever said that revolutions shouldn’t be well planned…

Twitter: @donalogc