Tom Ryan: GAA 'very quickly' decided against playing behind closed doors

GAA director general Tom Ryan has confirmed the organisation considered playing Allianz League games behind closed doors but opted against it as it would have been an “out of touch” move.

Speaking to GAA.ie today, Ryan explained that going ahead with the matches without spectators would not have been in the spirit of what the country is doing to combat the spread of coronavirus.

Instead, the GAA authorities, along with the Camogie Association and Ladies Gaelic Football Association, took what Ryan termed the “grave” decision “with a heavy heart” to suspend GAA training and games until Sunday fortnight.

He explained: “Off the top of my head, there were 22/23 games this weekend and out of that list there were 15 or 16 that were critical in terms of where League positions might end up or who might be promoted and so on.

“When we talked ourselves about playing games behind closed doors playing 15 or 16 games out of 22 and then looking at the following weekend, that looks very much like for the fixture programme and I think that would have been very much out of touch with what the country needs to do at the moment.

“It wouldn’t look right or feel right to have the GAA playing, albeit behind closed doors, a full fixtures programme. So we decided very quickly that that was something we didn’t want to do.”

Ryan said the GAA’s minds were made up by the decision to close the schools from today as they couldn’t ask for children to congregate for training or games when the Government had directed them not to do so in the classroom.

Having spoken to provincial councils, counties, and other stakeholders, a board meeting took place in Croke Park after which the decision was taken to ban all GAA activities until March 29 at the earliest.

Ryan revealed the GAA had been working on rearrangements prior to yesterday’s announcement by Taoiseach Leo Varadkar in Washington.

“We assembled a small team to look at various eventualities and contingencies that might come into play in certain circumstances. And up to yesterday and the day before, we had very much adopted a watching brief and we were advising all units and all clubs to abide to the letter the guidance that was issued from the HSE.

“I suppose things changed for us a little bit yesterday morning on two fronts and ironically enough we had our little group assembled at the time and were planning through a couple more scenarios when word came through that the Taoiseach was going to make an announcement so we deferred everything and we went to listen to what the Taoiseach had to say.

“I suppose like everybody else we would have had certain indications that those things were going to be announced and they changed things for us on two fronts. The first one being the closure of schools and the second one being the restriction on mass events.

“So, with those two things in mind, that very much changed our approach. We had been considering things like playing games behind closed doors. We had been looking at how practical it would be to continue out certain competitions or play at certain levels and not at others and so on.”