In rugby’s case, the Prod tradition isn’t the only reason. Many rugby clubs were started by the old school tie brigade. Their land came from the Church at a serious discount (like St Marys in Templeville Road) and adult members putting their money in. The money flowed from the adult levels and then eventually down to the kids. The adults had no problem putting money in as it’s a lifetime membership and you saw members getting right to the top of the sport.
With soccer it’s being professional for 140 years and game screwed towards that with few real loyalties.
@Horsebox and @treatystones avatars look quite similar when shrunk down in the reply mode. Can one/both parties rectify this anomaly to avoid future confusion/chaos/all out anarchy.
Can someone bullet point what Cabinteely are doing that makes them different? I had a few pints with two lads who are heavily involved with it in the Clyde Court after the Ireland v England 6 Nations match and I recall being impressed but my memory of the evening is a little hazy and I can’t really remember anything about our conversation.
I’d say competitively absolutely finished in the short term.
It’s a great game to play but being realistic even the most gifted young Irish lads now are climbing a Mount Everest equivalent if they think they will make a breakthrough in even a mediocre English club.
The national team will be absolutely fucked in about two or three years and interest in the game internationally will hit an all time low guaranteed.
The premier league product on the other hand will continue to grow here as will social astro games.
You have large clubs with big schoolboy sections and then small adult sections and those adult sections are supposed to subsidise the schoolboy sections.
Then you get a group of guys pissed off paying a few hundred euro to play for that club when they can just setup their own team and join the AUL or UCL or whatever and play for half the price or less and they can do their own thing and not have to be worried about club politics and finances and all that shit.
It means there are lots of adult clubs with no junior sections and lots of big schoolboy clubs with a paucity of adult teams.
Yea the playing surfaces would generally be better in soccer fields now, properly done with drainage and the like where as the GAA pitches often tend to be just fields converted , 2 main reasons for this I would guess. Fierst the time of year each sport is played , soccer pitches need to be well drained and level or you end up with mudbaths and second because most of the soccer fields would have been done in more recent times with proper contractors and plans where as GAA fields are around a lot longer in the main.
The state of pitches for some inter-county league games is atrocious to be honest. It’s a bit embarrassing watching an Allianz league game when you can’t see the players’ boots because the grass is so long.
Obviously the surface is more important for soccer but it’s completely disregarded too often in the GAA.
Yea your dead right , for intercounty pitches some are awful, I remember my first trip to croke park in 1994 i was sitting in the new cusack stand right along the 21 and I was shocked at how poor the field was, you could see the 21m line going up and down all over the place. Obviously it has changed dramatically since then but if you think the top ground in the country was like that only 20 years ago you can see why so many other grounds are still so bad.
I don’t know if the criteria has changed but the big issue a lot of smaller clubs face is that for any kind of capital grant you need to own the land, a lot of soccer clubs have gone to the wall or been unable to sustain things due to this as they might have been using a school pitch or a field that someone might have allowed them use of. The majority of gas clubs wouldn’t have this issue
To be fair to the Kilkenny cunts the one thing they can do is keep their pitches well maintained. Every GAA club ground in Kilkenny I’ve been to has had an unreal surface
I don’t see that being the case for much longer pal, the punter will only pay in to the Aviva so many games before feeling mugged off by the performances, results and most importantly lack of quality players on the team sheet.
The golden generation of Robbie, Duff, Dunne, O’Shea and Given aren’t being replaced by even near the same standard. For me I’ve said it before Brian Kerr needs to be drafted back into the underage game as a matter of urgency. He more then any other Irish manager of recent times got a raw deal and a lot of bad luck.
Thank fuck Ireland got over the trendy fad of rugby and rapistball.
I mean what type of cunt sent their child to rapistcamp every summer and diligently stood on the sideline every Sunday morning @ 9:15am to abuse the referee/priest in the hope that he could make it “big” in the premiership of cunts.
Cunt parents
Cunt spawn