The strange mirroring of the 20th century continues. Having marked the rough centenaries of pandemic and disrupted championships, the GAA now seems determined to embark on a modern civil war.
Like many civil wars, it’s rooted in a rejection of the prevailing order and the apparent powerlessness of authority to enforce its writ throughout the land.
It is dispiriting beyond measure. After the anxieties of lockdown and the community contribution made by clubs up and down the country there emerged the simple symbolism of allowing those same clubs centre stage for eight-and-a-half uninterrupted weeks. It has been met with the rejection of county managers and the indifference of administrators.
As Offaly chair Michael Duignan said on Newstalk last Monday: "We had a chance to say community and family comes first, and being with your own people comes first and what we have done is we've jumped straight back into the inter-county rat race."
The affliction of living in interesting times has agitated rather than tranquilised the county management corps and one supposes that in football the prospect of sudden-death championship fixtures has been concentrating minds wonderfully.
Nostalgic glow
Unwittingly and perhaps bathed in the nostalgic glow of old-style knockout with no second chance, the GAA has also shone a bright light on the rationale behind qualifiers in the first place: the creation of a more stable, balanced championship.
Without those safety nets we get to see the daftness of the old system. No-one’s arguing that there was room for anything else in a few weeks at the end of this year - assuming public health issues haven’t reasserted themselves - but when two heavy hitters like Tyrone and Donegal are drawn together, the lack of a second chance further electrifies the fixture and leaves one of the top six sides from the past two years out in the cold, literally.
As a showcase of the club as the essential unit in the association it's been as decorous as fisticuffs at a Feis
Anyway, there’s hardly a county you talk to where the senior team isn’t said to be training surreptitiously and even one where you can get confused between a training camp and a challenge match - ‘no, no, that was the previous week’.
Then there are the ones who are minded to obey the rules but are being driven to neurosis by the strong suggestion that the other crowd are at it three times a week ‘down the local silo’.
How did this happen?
Well, it was greatly facilitated by Covid-19 restrictions. Normally, the bigger part of county championship scheduling happens after the All-Irelands are done but this year with the improvised schedules it's the other way around and tugs-of-love are taking place over players, claimed by both club and county.
Some clubs won’t have it and some will be more diffident but as a showcase of the club as the essential unit in the association it’s been as decorous as fisticuffs at a Feis.
The two player organisations are shaping up for confrontation. The GPA were recently looking for their members' insurance to be reinstated to cover the weeks before the permitted return to collective training in mid-September - refused by the GAA - and the CPA calling for drastic penalties to be imposed on any county doing so, a proposal of limited appeal to Croke Park.
Delinquent behaviour
Both have their reasons. The inter-county union is reflecting the views of its members - players who want to train with the county and can’t understand the restrictions whereas the CPA knows the old rule of deterrent - if its hurts hard enough, the delinquent behaviour will stop.
County administrators are stuck between humouring the manager and protecting the club season, as outlined after all just a couple of weeks ago. There tends to be just one winner in those disagreements although there have been signs recently that some clubs are getting fed up.
The position of Croke Park has been curious. Having not alone selected the date, September 14th, for the return of county training but any time queries have been raised, defended it vehemently, the national administration has been ineffectually equivocal about enforcement.
DG Tom Ryan did raise the faint prospect of dealing with the issue but in a determinedly Augustinian way, raising the possibility that he may not have been talking about this season at all.
<br/> He cited the fall from grace of the Roman Catholic Church within Irish society as a warning of what happens to institutions that chronically fail to practise what they preach
It is believed that a major report will issue before the end of John Horan’s presidency with the purpose of - if not derailing - then certainly slowing down what one official has referred to as the ‘runaway train’ of the inter-county game.
The only way of achieving such a goal would be to make breaches of regulation and guideline a lot more trouble than they’re worth - something that everyone’s beginning to accept won’t happen this year.
Even with a bit of conviction this won’t be easy. The ‘Manager’s Charter’ from 2012 was intended to regulate relations between counties and managers for the benefit of club schedules.
Within a couple of years “half-hearted engagement” was being diagnosed as the reason behind the initiative’s lack of impact.
Coincidentally the idea of the charter originated in former DG Páraic Duffy’s discussion document on the issue of amateur status and payments to managers, which in turn was inspired by a speech from historian Professor Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh at an event for NUIG graduates to mark the GAA’s 125th anniversary.
Ó Tuathaigh's contention was that widespread, irregular payments to managers constituted a huge challenge to the GAA. He cited the fall from grace of the Roman Catholic Church within Irish society as a warning of what happens to institutions that chronically fail to practise what they preach and fail to punish those who breach their rules.
That is largely where Croke Park currently stands on the club issue. It introduced and defended a starting deadline for the county season but at the same time has declined to enforce it, which in GAA terms is effectively incentivising bad behaviour.
A couple of fractious months are on the horizon but they will provide any new committee tackling the club-county interface with a pile of ammunition.
smoran@irishtimes.com
