After the Dublin v Mayo replay in 2015, held on a glorious Saturday evening in front of 82k, Ger Gilroy and co. lamented âwhy canât we have this every week?â
You canât have it every week Ger because by definition the two best teams in Ireland going head to head in knockout competition with everything on the line can only happen once a year, or in this case twice because of a replay, which paradoxically we no longer have because Ger and co demanded these âbig gamesâ every week.
Everything is copy. Most things are bullshit, and what Ger and co. were offering was bullshit to fill air time.
The theme running through Adam Curtisâs documentaries is of utopians who dreamed that extreme ideologies or technological advances would lead to heaven on earth, and in each case, they made things worse.
The GAA split season reminds me of the Egyptian revolution. The masses organised via social media and gathered in Tahrir Square to demand CHAINJ, but they had no agreed vision of what CHAINJ actually meant. But the Muslim Brotherhood knew what changes they wanted, and they won the election on a minority vote and took power. The Muslim Brotherhoodâs no fun ever again ideology became the CHAINJ. The people who had cried out for CHAINJ when they gathered in Tahrir Square didnât like this version of CHAINJ, so they celebrated when the military overthrew the Muslim Brotherhood in a coup and brought back a new version of the very thing the protestors had previously railed against.
Social media has fecked up the GAA like it has fecked up everything else. We got CHAINJ, and now it turns out the CHAINJ is shit. Some of us warned what would happen. But the stupidity of crowds and the ego-driven obsession of certain GAA presidents and writers with leaving a âlegacyâ won out, in the process demolishing any semblance of common sense.
I would like Adam Curtis to do a three part BBC documentary on how the split season ruined the GAA, with liberal use of his trademark sayings âbut then the strangest thing happenedâ and âbut this was a fantasyâ.
This calls for a fact finding trip to Pittsburgh Steelers to explore how the college athletes they drafted juggled with the demands of football and study.
No English team left in Champions league or Europe League. Premier League looks over. Full steam ahead for Munster Championship with decent weather. The naysayers will be gutted.
The round robins (markâs fatter brother) will be good if given a chance. The predictability of a home championship match for every county is crucial. Itâs basically cheastys 1A/1B system too. Maybe they need 2 groups of 8 instead with just top 4 going to quarters.
Leinster seemingly close to selling out Croke Park within a couple of hours of general sale.
The GGA getting fractions of the crowds they did for fixtures they would have 10 years ago. Am I also right in saying All Ireland final stick ball games have struggled to sell out?
Iâm not a GGA man but itâs clear as day what a disaster this format is. 20 years ago you had a heap of tourists and kids on summer holidays going to cheap games throughout the summer.
Why the heck did they give that up?
I donât buy this idea of an amateur organisation doing the best they can for everyone. After all, weâve seen nonsense after nonsense from them on tv rights. That time when they claimed they had to sell to Sky Sports in Ireland so bricklayers in Sydney could watch games was a doozy.
As Iâm no longer involved with an adult club team, Iâve changed my mind on the split season. Iâve come to the conclusion that Itâs a shit idea.
What does âif given a chanceâ mean? You canât fool the public when it comes to attending sporting events, well, 99% of the time you canât. Fooling the public is overwhelmingly the preserve of politics and media and advertising.
Given a chance means leave it for a few years and see if people get used to it. Itâs new, people donât like change but it had to come. The old system was a dead duck.
The system doesnât work. Weâve already had the Super 8s which didnât work.
The Super 16 is worse. Tyrone lost their first game to Galway last year in front of a few men and their dogs. Then they played Armagh at Omagh on a sunny Saturday evening. It was shit, the place was half empty, and the game itself was shit.
If you canât persuade people that Tyrone v Armagh on a sunny Saturday evening matters, youâre not persuading anybody else that any other game in this format matters.
What actually happened was that Dublin and Kerry won their groups and sailed through their quarter-finals against jaded, demoralised teams, before their inevitable All-Ireland final meeting.
There was one game of any substance in the round robins which was Galway v Armagh which was played in front of 6k.
Meanwhile the âdead duckâ that is the Ulster final sold out Clones even in the first half of May and was one of the most tense and engaging games of the year.
