Indeed. I wrote the following last year. Far from the patronising, plamasing tokenism of the likes of Des Cahill, itâs a harsh but fair analysis of the standard of womenâs GAA which actually takes the games and their potential seriously rather than treating them as a sporting charity case about which no criticism should be allowed.
Womenâs GAA is crap.
The pace of the games is incredibly slow, the fitness isnât very good, the skills are awful - the players find it difficult to solo the ball, they canât shoot, they keep dropping the ball. Players more often than not panic when in possession. They donât appear to have much tactical nous or spatial awareness you regularly see passes aimed at where the target recipient is rather than the position they should be expected to run into. Womenâs GAA players do not train just as hard as men, and it shows, so letâs stop hearing that they do.
The coverage of the games is also incredibly patronising - itâs similar to what you get for the Paralympics - pretty much no criticism is ever allowed of either camogie or womenâs Gaelic football and âthe standardâ is always praised, even if itâs really, really bad, as it was today, and constant references are made to how much the games are âgrowingâ.
The camogie and womenâs football associations themselves are painted as forward thinking even though ridiculous situations often crop up on their watch, like in the camogie last year when they changed the rules to have a play-off and then made Dublin play the next day (possibly two days, canât remember for sure) after winning the play-off.
The countdown clock is a really poor system, is far too open to time wasting and rewards cynical fouls towards the end of the game.
That point that was given as a wide today was farcical. Why was HawkEye not used?
Until the coverage stops being patronising and brushing the poor standard under the carpet womenâs GAA cannot expect to be taken in any way seriously as proper sport.
Womenâs tennis, gymnastics, athletics and probably a few other individual sports can be taken seriously. Team sports like hockey and basketball have womenâs games that can be taken seriously. Even a physical sport like rugby (certainly the 7s at the Olympics and the last 15 a side World Cup) contains players who look like genuine athletes with genuine skill. These sports have women that can reasonably be called elite. Womenâs GAA contains neither proper athletes nor proper skill. Itâs miles away from being able to call itself âeliteâ.
Obviously thereâs always going to be a massive gap between it and menâs hurling and football but whatâs on show year after year is undoubtedly a poor product compared to what it could be.
