It feels like we used to get a lot more upset about the All Stars. They were once a key plank of our winter-shortening strategy, but last week both teams were released to near-universal approval. Let’s face it, near-universal approval goes against everything the All Stars are supposed to be about.
The whole idea of it is to provoke debate. If it doesn’t provoke debate, if the TV show isn’t appointment-to-watch television, then it doesn’t seem like it’s functioning as it should.
For many people, the dominance of the All-Ireland finalists has been the glaring problem with the selection process over the last decade or more. How can it all come down to one game? How can the team that might have been picked at half-time in this year’s All-Ireland hurling final show four or five changes to the one you’d pick after the 21-point swing in Tipperary’s favour which came in the second half? On what planet can that be deemed fair?
To which the only answer is – on Planet GAA. I never tire of recycling a line from the writer and podcaster Dion Fanning, who said once that the GAA is not a season, more a series of prize fights. The GAA year is not about continued excellence, quiet efficiency, relentless consistency.
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Boxers do not become world champions by fighting everyone and leaving it up to Ring magazine to decide who the best in the business is. They might take an 11-round pummelling, but one big shot wins them the title. No one gainsays it, because that’s the reality of the sport. But the general principle is that the cream will rise to the top.
In the GAA, it’s not just about what you do, it’s when you do it. If the All Stars were picked on a truly democratic basis, then you might say the end of the All-Ireland football round-robin series this year would have been a good time to pick them. Everyone had played seven games in the league, a provincial championship for however long they were able to stay in it and three group games. But even after the group stages, Kerry still hadn’t played a Division One team in the summertime. Derry had played only Division One team all year.
The current championship system is still too uneven to come up with a representative view of the best players of the year at that early a stage. Not enough of the big guns play each other.
The league should be vital in separating the best performances of the year. However, David Clifford won Footballer of the Year last Friday night and credited the fact he was able to take a good portion of the start of the season off. Shane O’Donnell won Hurler of the Year last year having taken the league off entirely. Until everyone playing in it takes the league seriously, we can’t take the league seriously. We certainly shouldn’t be attaching any more All Star weight to performances in the league than we currently are.
There is another possible solution, which is to pick the All Stars between the All-Ireland semi-final and final. This would, in theory, mean the end result of the season wouldn’t dictate the entire make-up of the team. But both All-Ireland champion teams this year played only three real knock-out games; the games that would define their season.
For Kerry in particular, everything before that Armagh quarter-final was prologue. To say the All-Ireland final wouldn’t be taken into account in the final reckoning of the season would mean the All Stars isn’t telling the full story of the year, and I think that’s a problem.
Besides all that, there is another, more obvious point worth making. The year’s best players are on the year’s best teams. In three of the last five years, nine players on the PFA Premier League Team of the Year came from the top two. That’s a higher percentage than either of the All Star teams this year, in the most forensically analysed sports league in the world, with the deepest pool of football talent across a season where everyone plays everyone else, twice.
Whatever about choosing it while the season is still ongoing, we could certainly hand them out in a more timely fashion. The awards ceremony is so far after the end of the season that it’s difficult for the engaged fan to remember on whose behalf we should be getting outraged.
It would be wonderful to put more stock in performances from the Munster Hurling Championship, but by the time the team is announced, those sterling performances by the likes of Limerick’s Adam English from early in the year are over six months old.
If we at least picked the teams a couple of weeks after the season is over, there might be a chance for people to get upset about them. We now finally have a hurler presenting Liveline (one who played in a Kilkenny county final against Ballyhale Shamrocks, for God’s sake), so let’s give him something to really get his teeth into.
An August All Stars date would run afoul of plenty of club schedules too, though. The golden rule when giving out about an All Star team is that you can’t say a fella deserved one, without saying which fella didn’t deserve his. In the same spirit – they might not be perfect in their current form, but the alternatives seem even less perfect.
