Dara Ó Cinnéide: 'If you don’t have county players present in club matches, the game is gone'
An Ghaeltacht selector Dara Ó Cinnéide celebrates with players. Pic: Piaras Ó Mídheach/Sportsfile.
Dara Ó Cinnéide has encouraged the GAA to get behind the principle of former Dublin footballer Dr Noel McCaffrey’s proposal to reconnect inter-county players with their clubs.
The An Ghaeltacht chairman, a selector with the club’s recent All-Ireland winning intermediate footballers, admits the motion to create an eligibility level of eight club appearances in the previous season to play for one’s county the following year will put pressure on fixture-makers.
However, Ó Cinnéide is wholeheartedly behind the spirit of the idea that McCaffrey will table via his Clontarf club at Annual Congress in Croke Park on Saturday.
“The principle of it, I agree with,” says Kerry’s 2004 All-Ireland SFC winning captain.
“I wouldn’t like to be on a fixtures committee trying to accommodate it but on a philosophical level Noel McCaffrey is right. If you don’t have county players present in club matches, the game is gone, and that’s the direction that has been taken the last couple of years. And this is just an attempt at a kind of rebalancing.
“I can see the challenges on both sides. I can see the demands we’ve made on players, county players in particular, on both sides by the split season. But it should be doable with an understanding county manager and a really clever fixtures committee in the county.
“Can we just establish the Noel McCaffrey principle and then over to you, fixture-makers, let's make this happen because all county players want to play with their club. It's the old argument that Dónal Óg Cusack was making: county players are club players too, and don't be trying to set the two lots off against each other.”
Ó Cinnéide knows from his experience with Brian and Cathal Ó Beaglaoich that elite players want to do what’s best for their club.
“Brian would have played eight games with us. Jack O’Connor has always been good to release players who need games or are coming back from injury for club league games.
“Brian is a very good club man for us. Yes. He'll play when he can. And he'll say, ‘Look, I'm injured.’ Like, last year, Brian didn't have the perfect year because he had to pull out of the Kerry's county quarter-final against Dingle with an injury to get himself right.
“It was a genuine case, and it broke my heart because we were missing four players that day and I thought Dingle were vulnerable. But Brian did what was right for him and ultimately for The Gaeltacht.
“Cathal Ó Beaglaoich would have played a few league games, even though he was in with the Kerry squad and he would have played the six games in the intermediate championship.”
Ó Cinnéide noted O’Connor’s comments on Saturday about the impact the divisional championships have on inter-county players.
“The pressure is coming now not to have the county players play the district club championship, which in our case would be maybe two games, three games max in the West Kerry championship at the end of the year.
“Personally, I wouldn't be willing to give that up to the county scene. I can see Jack's point of view but it's a challenge for the fixture-makers.
“I sat on the committee trying to revamp the county championships. There's not a whole lot that you can revamp radically. We decided to leave the club championships untouched because they were working so well and obviously a measurement of that is the Kerry clubs winning the All-Irelands this year. Like, that's not down to not being touched; that was the standard anyway.
“The intermediate championship in Kerry, I think, is one of the greatest championships of all, and that's not because we came out of it and won it. It’s just that it's almost impossible to win it. Like, you've one bad day and you're out of it. There are16 teams that are all very equal.”
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