Gaelic Games - Trying to makes sense of it all

August 2007

Meanwhile the GAA counted the cash, well over one million per game. Which leaves this amateur game in a crux, whether to pay players or not, another anachronism the GAA clings to, desperately seeking to retain its amateur status when the coffers continue to swell and the crowds continue to pour in to watch these unpaid stars of the game. The players aren�t officially looking for pay-for-play status at the moment though some argue it�s only a matter of time and when you explain to a stranger that 80,000 people will pay an average of �60 to watch them play and none of the players receive a penny, it�s hard to convince them you�re not telling fairy stories.

In the year 2007, the All-Ireland football championship has changed dramatically from the championship of a decade ago. Then the 32 county teams, the elite squad formed from the best club players in each county, trained six months of the year and half of those counties only ever played one match. The championship was knock out, pure and simple, the counties playing within their province (there are four provincial championships still, Ulster, Leinster, Munster and Connacht, with the counties split along the geographical divide) to try and win a provincial crown which would put them into an All-Ireland semi-final against one of the other provincial winners. Those two winners battled it out on the first and third Sundays of September for the Sam Maguire (football) and Liam McCarthy (hurling) trophies, respectfully.

Leagues are played through the winter but that still is, and was, a distant second to the championship. When teams started training in October, the month after the conclusion of the All-Ireland, they only had their opening championship match in April or May in mind. Those teams went to extraordinary lengths back then which seem insane now. Running up hills, through trenches, on Christmas mornings, punching each other in the stomach to harden their muscles, running the perimeter of a pitch 30 or 40 times, abstaining from alcohol completely usually. And sometimes food the days they had training because it would be washed up in the goalmouth later that night. The Cork senior football team used to run up a sand dune on a beach, endlessly until the players were collapsed from the puking and no longer puking because there was nothing left in their stomach. This was a cold November Saturday morning. An English couple, out for a walk on the strand asked when was their match.
�May,� came the reply to their stunned ears.

Ten years on the demands have increased though they�re not insane anymore. Players train to individual programmes, fitness and diet is monitored. Team meetings are a weekly thing, sports psychologists are common in most camps. Statisticians, physios, doctors and masseurs all work behind the scenes. It�s a seven day a week vocation with an ordinary job squeezed in between.

We�re at the midway point in the current season. The provincial finals are almost upon us but the system has changed and no longer are teams dumped out of a competition at the first hurdle even if they lose. In hurling, there are three All-Ireland competitions. The Liam McCarthy Cup is played for by the strongest counties, twelve in total. The provincial winners and losers go straight into the quarter-finals, from where it�s knockout, the rest enter two groups of four and the top two in each qualify to complete the quarter final line up. The rest of the hurling counties are split up into the Christy Ring and Nicky Rackard competitions, with round-robin group stages in each before the knockout system kicks in.

In football there are two competitions now. The weakest counties, of which there are nine, enter the Tommy Murphy Cup once they�re beaten in their own provincial championship, while the rest enter the qualifier series, apart from the provincial champions.

The qualifier system is a second chance saloon, or the back-door as it�s become known. There are three rounds now, with the losers� pool added to after each round of the provincial championships, i.e. the losing provincial finalists enter the qualifiers at the final stage, from which four teams emerge to play the four provincial champions. It�s a bit convoluted now compared to the system that it replaced but for the effort that the counties put in, one serious game every year wasn�t going to sate this vicious appetite.

It�s meant the clubs in each county are robbed of their best players for most of the year and for most of the year the clubs don�t get to play their own championships because so many weekends are consumed by the never-ending inter-county machine. And that�s the main conflict in this world, from what I can see now. The GAA grew from roots so basic it�s hardly credible they never withered. It remains as much a parochial organisation as a national one. The biggest rows are at club games and the latest wave of violence across the rural backwaters which still live and breathe the GAA has seen a spree of headbutts. In once incident a referee was laid out cold on the pitch while a melee continued above him.
In a recent Munster hurling championship game between Clare and Cork, the two teams raced onto the pitch at the same, released from the dressing rooms like caged animals and jostling and pushing each other at breakneck speed as they entered the pitch, through a cordon of schoolchildren decked out to greet their heroes. It wasn�t a major row as GAA rows go but the fallout continues and after seven players were suspended, the warring factions of the GAA, the media, the two counties, the two teams and the association�s president all ended up trading insults. Discipline is top of the current agenda. But pay for play and improved player rights will continue to hog the headlines.

Above all that remains a glorious spectacle. There are no feigned attachments. You support the place you�re from. You play in the place you were born and you represent your own county. It�s all about identity. For more years than anyone is prepared to count anymore, the Irish battled with the British Empire for the very same reason. And when you sit in Croke Park and take it all in, hearing the cacophony of 80,000 people fanatically transfixed by a game that lasts 70 minutes, you know that at the heart of the GAA is identity. And at the heart of the Irish psyche is that desperate need to shout profanities at referees and opposition players to assert that identity before returning to work Monday morning, dressed bespoke and cappuccino be drunk.