Kevin Johnston and Dermot McBride and a few others lined out for their clubs the week before Derry played Tyrone.
It’s a tv consumer’s attitude, they want their championship “product”, day-to-day reality of clubs etc doesn’t come into it.
Yea that’s growing more and more prevalent. They’ll have their 8 team championship soon enough.
Itll be hailed as the greatest thing since sliced bread,but the reality is croke park has been infiltrated by a load of bean counters who only give a shit about $$$$$$$$$$$.They couldnt give a fuck about the clubs.Filling croke pk as often as possible is all they care about.
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Correct. Their interest is ‘the product’. The signs have been there for a long time.
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Simple solution. All club championships start no earlier than the last week in July.
If the county team reaches the All-Ireland hurling final the start of the club championship will have to be put back four weeks, if the county reaches the All-Ireland football final it’ll be six weeks. That’s four counties out of 32 affected. It’s a better solution than the ridiculous situation that currently exists where players wait around for rounds of the club championship to happen, which then don’t happen. Running a club championship by hoping to fit in rounds in the gaps between inter-county matches which probably won’t even materialise is a fool’s game.
All club matches up to the time of the county’s exit from the inter-county championship go ahead without county players. Club players then don’t have to sit around waiting. They will have a far greater degree of certainty for when they have to peak.
If a county manager wants to release a county player who is not getting much game time for a club league match to keep him match fit, by all means. But that has to be sorted out between that club and that manager.
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This.
The club nazis will probably object to this.
Just like they’d demand their daughter stays at home and works the kitchen, instead of getting a good education and career, while they are promised to Mick Mullooly’s son down the road because they have a few acres.
Joe Brolly is full of it at the moment about how this new system destroys clubs.
That’s nonsense, but the thing is that Joe when he played clearly prioritised county over club himself, hence his Twitter handle being @JoeBrolly1993, not @JoeBrolly1997, when Dungiven won the Ulster club championship.
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No county player to my knowledge misses club championship games due to their county involvement, all they miss is a lot of run of the mill league games.
The issue, with club players, which is understandable, is their whole year being put on hold because of the fixture problesm, county players should be taken out of the equation and the Championship should be ran off in a more efficient manager. Most counties will have their clubs having access to the bulk of their county players for a large chunk of the league campaign and full Championship when their involvement ends. With the All Irelands not set to be concluded in August.
All clubs should have their county players for club championship from September onwards.
This is the official document with a detailed fixtures schedule for the new system based on 2016 fixtures and calendar.
Seems reasonable
That certainly eases the club issue.
Using Cork as an example, season over at start of July.
County players are available for club league games July-Sept.
What’s the problem for clubs there? Do they want their club players available for the whole shagging league?
Derry and Kerry are missing a host of players at the minute for their league campaign due to club duty, I don’t hear any of their managers bumping their gums moaning about not having access to them right now.
His Twitter handle is conclusive evidence of that? Seriously??
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Oh FFS sake.
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The reality is that if there’s no “product”, there’s no GAA. Every other sport is a product. If the GAA isn’t too, it won’t be able to compete.
Few kids play sport these days because of tradition or because of “the glory of the parish”. They play because they see something on television, because it’s attractive and because they have heroes to look up to. Hell, some kids even play a certain sport now because they start playing a computer game based version of it first.
Even the senior club championships are a “product” now. And so they should be. They should be more of a “product” than they already are. But to make something a “product” costs money. And that money comes from filling Croke Park.
I wish it was a spreadsheet.
The bit about the money is gas - Ewan something or other was having a melt down about the blatant greed of the GAA on the radio this evening, when in actual fact this proposal will most likely result in less revenue.
Do the kids on Twitter tell you this? Kids will play whatever is available to them as long as it’s fun, so round here it’s gaelic, soccer, golf, surfing and maybe rugby at a push. Coaching is available in those sports so they’ll migrate that way. Family tradition is important in a rural context, as kids will first want to emulate parents and family, rather than someone off the telly, or even a computer game.
The Super 8 provides eight more fixtures to make up for the shortfall from the lack of replays.
There clearly is a money aspect to it, but I don’t see the problem with that, in fact it’s clearly a good thing.
One problem I foresee with the Super 8 system is that I think it’s inevitable that counties will not get the home fixtures they are promised.
Say you have a group with Dublin, Kerry, Donegal and Fermanagh.
Kerry would be able to host Dublin alright, but would Donegal or Fermanagh be deemed to have stadiums capable of doing so? Would Kildare?
Also, the draft schedule has a flaw - it shows Group 1 having a two week break between fixtures 1 and 2, whereas Group 2 plays on three straight weekends.
But then the All-Ireland semi-finals take place the following weekend.
That means both qualifiers from Group 2 would be playing an All-Ireland semi-final on their fourth week out in a row, whereas the two Group 1 qualifiers would be playing the semi-final on their third week out in a row. That’s a clear imbalance.
I can tell you from my own experience. I mainly played and watched association football up to the age of 11 because I saw Liverpool on the television regularly and they were my heroes, and everything else was boring and inferior.
I did like hurling, but that was because of the Tipperary-Cork and Tipperary-Galway matches in 1987. Which were “products” with excitement and glamour. But those sorts of matches were only two or three times a year in a good year so I forgot about hurling.
Overall I had little enough interest in GAA until the four Dublin-Meath matches in 1991. I didn’t start playing or become a fanatic because of a love of any parish or local tradition or desire to emulate a parent, but because I was intoxicated by the atmosphere of those matches. Those matches were a “product”, and if a sport can’t give kids a product, they won’t care about it.
If you ain’t got a “product”, you have nothing. “Local pride” means less and less.
And there won’t be coaching either if there’s no product.
If selling the product to the younger generation is your key point then I agree. But, by and large the majority of supporters have little or no interest in meaningless games until Knockout kicks in in the Championship.
So the Gaa as a product is a much different sell.
Attendance figures for most games outside the knockout bracket would very much back this theory up.
In saying that attendance figures for games Pre the Back Door in Munster Hurling for example were far better. I would guess attendances at Club Championship games was far better too.