Myself and Bandage were discussing the farce that is the Dublin SFC at the weekend. Good article by Tom Humphries in the Irish Times today on the problems it is causing:
Dublin farce highlights general malaise
Tom Humphries
Locker Room: 'Tis autumn and the season when pieties about the fate of the GAA club player float down upon us like leaves from the trees. You know the sort of thing: and now a word for our faithful club players, it must be awful for you. Sorry.
Actually, it is awful. The tail which comprises the four per cent of players who play senior intercounty wags the big dog composed of the 96 per cent of players who donât. Nobody cares.
Pieties is perhaps too dramatic a word. It was good, for instance, to hear Dessie Farrell note recently that, âthe club player is being held to ransomâ. Dessie, as the Gaelic Playersâ Association (GPA) chief, is also the playersâ representative on Central Council. He is also enduring the first year in a long, long time as a purely club-level player. I imagine he is shocked.
Not to be parochial about it (Well, okay, to be parochial, this column, it must be disclosed, is St Vincentâs lowliest member; Dessie is a shining light up the road in Na Fianna. The clubs are due to meet in an oft-delayed county semi-final), but the Dublin county championship annually holds up the most ludicrous and most heart-rending cases of players being held to ransom. It is a showcase of all that is wrong with the plight of the club player.
Of course, much of what is wrong with the club players in Dublin is caused by the clubs themselves. There is a strong feeling in the county that all the barrack-room lawyers should just get together in February and decide upon an acceptable winner of each championship, thus saving everyone the inconvenience of actual football and hurling or, as is more often the case, the promise of actual football and hurling.
Last year, for instance, the St Vincentâs senior hurlers went 87 days without a championship game in the middle of the championship. This year, on the football front, Kilmacud Crokes declined to play their semi-final against UCD last Thursday night (not saying their reasons werenât valid, but they pushed harder than anyone else) and consequently the county board threw them out of the championship.
UCD, in the tradition, we assume, of preferring to win anything on the field of play than in the committee room, offered Crokes an alternative date on Thursday of next week. The county board shrugged their shoulders and went along. Clubs may apparently make private arrangements for when they play games. This could, in fact, be the way forward.
Na Fianna, meanwhile, enjoyed the services of Mayoâs Gary Mullins in their quarter-final win over St Oliver Plunkettâs. Mullinsâ remarkable footballing record is that he appears to have hop-scotched from Mayo to North America to Dublin in the space of a few months. On the way he picked up a 12-week suspension in Chicago in September. Nevertheless, he played against Plunkettâs.
Apparently this is all okay. (St Vincentâs have a young player who wishes to transfer from Clontarf after an internal row there last summer. This young player is sitting out an entire year of his career because Clontarf ainât happy. This is kosher too.)
All this and the interminable postponements and the now accepted imposition of asking club players to play midweek under lights regardless of work commitments are part and parcel of the Dublin championship. The final is supposed to have been done and dusted by now. Instead, as a result of a remarkable intervention from Croke Park last week, nobody knows when the final will be played.
Letâs just set the scene. Crokes and UCD had settled their affairs and fixed a date. Everyone happy. St Vincentâs and Na Fianna were due to play in Parnell Park on Thursday evening last. It was whispered around the place that Na Fianna werenât happy. In the end, the point became redundant. It rained all day Thursday. Semi-final off till Friday, the 27th, said the county board, looking out on their waterlogged Parnell Park.
Now, you are a club player. At the start of the season the county board issued a schedule with the county final fixed, as it happens, for the weekend just past. You are a serious footballer and an optimist, so you speak with your club manager and arrange your work holidays for the week after the county final. You book your time off work, your partner in life - or at least in holidaying - does the same. If you have kids these holidays are in term, but thatâs another story.
Autumn arrives and you are, as Dessie Farrell says, held to ransom. Not just by the elite of your county squad or by clubs with more sharp lawyers than players, but by Croke Park itself.
No sooner had the Dublin County Board announced the delayed semi-final would now be played next Friday than the special black phone with a hotline to Croke Park rang out in the county board offices. Absolutely not! thundered Croker.
Kieran McGeeney will be playing International Rules next weekend. He plays for Na Fianna. Ergo, Na Fianna canât play championship on Friday night. No way. Na Fianna, you must remember, have already agreed to the Friday night arrangement.
So, now the fate of about 50 players who have been waiting a long, long time to play their county semi-final is being disrupted to facilitate one playerâs participation in something that is neither Gaelic football nor hurling but is, apparently, As Hard As It Gets. Hereâs hoping (wink, wink) for a clean series, eh!
This all means St Vincentâs and Na Fianna have now had their game put back to the bank holiday Monday, that all the hasty and costly arrangements to fly back from holidays for the Friday must now be changed again and that the club championship in Dublin is devalued even further.
Should Na Fianna win on that bank holiday Monday, one presumes Croke Park wonât be letting the Dublin club football final proceed the following weekend either as McGeeney will be involved in the second episode of the International Rules (provided a âhard as it gets Aussieâ doesnât remove his head).
This once again imperils Dublinâs participation in the Leinster club championship. The Dublin champions were due to meet on November 4th/5th whoever wins between the champions of Louth and the champions of Meath. That has already been put back a week.
Will the county final be played midweek under lights with the new champions expected to play a Leinster championship match at the weekend? Probably.
Which means virtually all the serious games in the championship have been played under lights on workday evenings, screwing the players and screwing the real clubs who obviously would like to take their juvenile sections along to see the seniors playing. Clubs canât organise such trips for night games in Croke Park during school term.
In the end, the chances are UCD will win out. Playing in the evening, playing in midweek, suits the college. Not having a juvenile section to nurture, UCD are unperturbed by the absence of same at games. The students have been sharpening themselves in their domestic championships during the summer, and the further into term the Dublin championship strays the better drilled the college team get.
UCD enjoy another great benefit which clubs teams miss out on: their county players can commit themselves to the elite for the summer without remorse. Any club side with a couple of county players knows the difficulties. County players, the clubâs best players, are gone for months on end. Your sappers do duty playing in the leagues and the tournaments, doing the training. You encourage them, naturally with the lure of the championship.
And then, hurrah, your county men are paroled for a week and you have a choice: leave them out (and humiliate them as they would see it), or play them and then turn your own sorrowful puss back to the young sappers the following week.
Croke Park recently announced two new windows of opportunity for club matches to be played during any given season. Even the delegates present at the time couldnât pretend that this time wouldnât be eaten up by insecure county managers greedy for more time with their players.
Itâs time to turn back the clock and give the balance of power back to the clubs. Take county players away from their clubs for maybe 14 days before an intercounty championship match and five days before a league game. A little longer for All-Ireland finals and semi-finals.
For the rest of the year, give the GAA back to the people who make up the GAA.