The issues that Dublin has are issues that all urban areas have and Ireland is a majority urban/suburban society rather than rural.
Getting kids to play early in life is great but I donāt see how it could be in any way controversial that the inter-county scene and especially the major matches in Croke Park are incredible promotional tools for the sports as a whole.
There isnāt a child who has ever played the games who hasnāt imagined themselves playing in a full Croke Park.
How successful or not is another question, but on this topic - when the Mid Western Health Board took up the sponsorship of the Limerick county teams in 1997, the national schools got packs of GAA player stickers and other paraphernalia. I had a bedside dresser that was covered in stickers of the likes of Jack Foley and Richard Bowles until quite recently.
Football stickers were a major promotional tool in my day. Everybody collected them, though Iām sure things have moved on now.
There was a GAA sticker album in 1995, but it was a dreadful yoke you got with Corn Flakes packets.
The stickers were mainly used to stick on peopleās backs at school.
But Iāll refer you to your first post on which I commented.
I dont disagree that kids want to play in Croke Park or want to be there, but by and large, kids who play GAA come into it at a young age when the intercounty stuff means little or nothing to them. Children are developing an affiliation by playing, not by watching.
And back to the original point, the split season, to kids, will make little or no difference to things. Those county players will still be there at league and championship time. It makes it easier for them to get to games now with the majority of games happening whilst still in school. There are fewer clashes with their own games and intercounty games, as kids GAA is in its peak mid summer when a lot of the intercounty will be winding down.
If promoting the games is the key for kids, then the media, particularly RTE, are failing this terribly. And the GAA by proxy is responsible for this. No magazine show, no proper highlights show, little or no promotion of games and live games which are made up of analysis of the analysts. The split season has no bearing on any of those faults.
Children donāt play for their county. How then could they develop a county affiliation except by going to matches or watching on television?
again, you view this from the perspective that the only thing of interest is county. you have a very different viewpoint to a large amount of people who would be club first and its why this issue is being discussed where a lot of people have no care for a club and are only interested in the county scene. And thats perfectly fine, there are thousands out there who dont have an interest in the club game. I dont like the āfior gaelā bullshit and one-upmanship that some may say about only following county. Some people dont have a club attachment for whatever reason. but its the clubs who develop the county set ups. Kids play for their club, and thatās where the love for the sport really starts. You dont need to have a county affiliation to be interested in playing GAA. That develops. But what gets kids into GAA first and foremost is joining the club and playing.
youāre not going to change your mind on this so I wont be going around in circles with it.
My main point is the split season will have fuck all impact on whether children play GAA or not.
It absolutely helps adults who play at club level, which is where the vast majority of GAA members are. I think it will actually help the kids playing season too. We have missed county games because of a blitz on a Sunday morning and not either wanting or being able to travel to a county game that same day. Whereas the kids games here at least are only really starting up and weāve been able to get to league and championship games already.
The majority of inter county players come from families who are deep rooted in the GAA.
They go to local games from the time they can walk and cannot remember a time when their local club was not a part of their lives.
They only discover proper IC at 7/8 when they get older.
The club is always there and central to life. The county is then the dream.
Thatās the way it always has and will be.
I donāt think county is the only thing. County is the main thing in terms of what drives interest in the sports because it is the elite level.
Elite level is the main driver of interest in every sport, but apparently the GAA is different to every sport in the world.
It is utterly preposterous that the main shop window for the sport, inter-county, is being downgraded and moved away from its traditional time frame to a time when it will get less media exposure and lower attendances, in order to pander to club players (who will be shortly moaning they have to play at a time when theyād normally go on holiday) or because of some bizarre notion that it will help childrenās GAA.
This fails to take account of the changes in Irish society. Irish society is majority urban/suburban and minority rural. It is multi-cultural. Intra-Ireland migration is higher than ever before. Less and less people live their adult lives where they grew up and therefore their children will not play for the same clubs their parents played for.
If the GAA just wants to cater to āour peopleā (and I use the phrase not in a complimentary way), that is a recipe for stagnation and itās also a recipe for immigrants to Ireland as well as migrants within Ireland to reject it.
Evolution is essential but throwing away your best traditions doesnāt help that.
Choosing a route similar to the Gaeilscoil model of having an ostensibly reasonable basis for existence, ie. protecting Irish culture, but having a nasty underbelly of āpeople like usā cliqueishness and unspoken racial and ethnic exclusion would be a disaster.
Because they have absolutely no interest in watching the match and have been bored out of their tree for the previous 35 minutes. They are only there because their aul fellas had to bring them to be allowed out of the house.
Iād say the concept of bringing the backpack full of toys to keep them distracted wouldnāt really fit into his narrative either
Toys
Snacks
And a constant need to be looking around to make sure where the little cunts are
Iām pretty sure thatās not the reason.
They go because they get to kick or puck around on an inter county pitch when there is a crowd in the stadium, which means they can play at being at Con OāCallaghan or Joe Canning or Lee Chin for 10 minutes, which is an exciting thing to experience for children.
Itās opposite in Dublin - kids games stop for summer and sort of come to a peak around now so itās harder to get to matches.
Weāve a blitz tomorrow with 10 clubs from around Dublin and some from outside it attending and Iāll spend most of the afternoon today helping set that up meaning we wonāt go to Croke Park
We had Dublin players and Sam every year for some of the young lads formative years.
I donāt think the county thing makes a difference for most of them until they are 11 or 12 and even then in a county like Dublin playing county is miles away for most of them - playing first team club football in a big club in Dublin is in itself a big achievement for a young lad
Edit - the county interest in young lads is driven by parents (usually dads or at least it was) bringing kids to matches. My aul lad was and is a big GAA supporter. I spent a lot of Sundays as a kid going to county matches and in those days I could go to any meaningful final apart from the odd All Ireland final when I was too small to go over a style and too small to go on a terrace. If your parents bring you to county matches itās interesting for you. Otherwise you donāt give it much thought versus your own playing.
@cheasty you are coming at it from the perspective of probably the biggest fan of spectator sports I have ever encountered in my 40 plus years on the planet. Your experience might not tally with the average person. All of us here are far bigger fans of watching sport than the vast majority of people and were probably the same as kids but you are a different level again. I came from a house where we watched loads of sport but as Iāve got older Iāve realised most people can take or leave it. And kids these days are totally different again. They simply do not watch matches especially on TV.
If the gaa could market the players into āstarsā it might be a different matter. But they didnāt manage it with the Dublin six in a row team and it will never happen.
For example Kerry will probably win football All Ireland. Few weeks later David Clifford will be playing junior club championship for Fossa. What a great promotional tool that will be. Kids getting to see Clifford up close, i am sure the crowd will be miles bigger than if it was played as per usual in the April club month.
How would it be a promotional tool given there will be nobody there and no media coverage of such a game?
You mustnāt have encountered too many people in that case.
Thatās quite the generalisation about children. Do you think many will look in at the Champions League final tonight? I suspect they might, you know.
Iām not sure what your definition of āstarā is. The Dublin team of the last decade are mostly household names.
But not from anything the GAA proactively didā¦ it was more the social responsibility of some of Jim Gavins brilliant young men that brought them into the public arena ā¦an outstanding group.
Sure itās obviously a generalisation Iām talking about children in general.
The Dublin team arenāt household names among children even in Dublin.