SIDELINE CUT:Now that the cash-rich and good times have ended there is a jaded look about the championship this year, but the GAA won't panic

THE IRISH summer is in full bloom and once again it is bamboozling the nation. There is no crazier weather pattern in all the world.

Last week in Clones on the way to the Armagh-Derry match, I heard a man marvelling that he had managed to get sunburnt and hailstoned on the same day. Clones has, for the last decade anyhow, been the most raucous of all the provincial summer venues. Coaches ferried youngsters to the game from the various towns in the competing counties and the Northern fans like to glam up for these local derbies, as if solid old St Tiernach’s Park might somehow be transformed into a velvety nightclub after sundown.

They would get the popsicles in early on and novices of these days – teenage boys with braided county colour headbands wrapped around their heads – would often be worse for wear even before they walked the steep hill up to the park, swaying in front of the chip vans and looking dopily cheerful about the world.

I remember being in Clones for an Ulster final in the company of the late Seán Kilfeather of these pages. The game was over: earlier Armagh had beaten Down to bridge a 16-year-old gap as Ulster champions and the reaction was one of pandemonium. And it was one of one of those Irish summer afternoons straight out of a John Hinde postcard: big skies and an absolute scorcher. There was good-natured bedlam on the streets but the high spirits and the sunshine and the drink meant that several fans were, in the delicate phrase, “gettin’ messy”.

We were standing not far from the Creighton Hotel and Seán was in conversation with a woman who had served tea and sandwiches in a venue that was used as a press centre for the afternoon. He was beginning to despair of the scenes around him and was engaged in an enjoyable debate with the woman about the occasion. The woman was having none of it, pointing out that the Ulster football championship was Clones’s only boom day and that the merriment was part of “who we are”.

At that moment, a young man came roaring past us on the street and dive-bombed through a group of his friends, tossing a couple of girls like skittles in the process. At that, Kilfeather cast a rueful eye at the scene and looked at his host before growling, “I suppose that’s part of who we are too” and then they both roared in laughter.

Last week, that scene returned to me because the mood in Clones was quiet. This was just a semi-final but nonetheless, the crowd was small and the town didn’t have the same carnival feel as usual. It mirrored the story occurring in other GAA grounds around the country this summer. Crowds are down and the intensity of emotion – the interest – in the championship does not seem as strong as it used to be.

That Armagh-Down final in 1999 marked the beginning of a sensational decade for the GAA. Hard hats were still the order of the day in Croke Park, with work on the new Hogan stand about to begin. The arduous task of constructing the site gave rise to one of the most memorable lines of the decade: after Meath, the reigning All-Ireland champions were knocked out in June of 2000 by Offaly, Meath’s mercurial half-forward Trevor Giles remarked “Who wants to win an All-Ireland on a building site anyhow?” (The answer proved to be Kerry, wouldn’t you know).

But Croke Park was finished and polished and it looked intimidating and wonderful as it rose above Seán O’Casey’s old stomping ground. And then the GAA came up with the qualifiers wheeze. And all of a sudden the championship seemed filled with new possibilities and there was a novelty of seeing counties like Fermanagh and Sligo not just getting a day out in Croke Park but winning there. U2 and other international artistes of the day were played on the stereo systems before games.

It became commonplace to see choppers landing behind the stands named after this or that stalwart Gael marking the arrival of the moneyed men who wanted to keep it real by supporting the county but not so real that they wanted to get stuck in the two-mile traffic jam. The leaders of the nation made regular appearances.

Once, on a faintly surreal day when the Dubs were in the qualifiers and had to come up to Leitrim, Taoiseach Bertie Ahern took his seat beside the mayor and the chairman of Leitrim CLG and the Fourth Estate in a packed press box.

At half time, he stood in the little kitchen drinking tea and eating sandwiches and you could tell that people were wowed by the fact that he was there. That was then. The GAA became fashionable and corporate: a great family day out and a great way to mix business and pleasure. And the teams played their part: half-killing themselves in the delusion that they could be professional as well as hold down jobs or study or hit the road selling stuff for big companies and giving the GAA’s mass audience some truly magical games.

Then the Gesture: Croke Park was opened and even though it wasn’t about the ka-ching ka-ching but the history, the arrival of the IRFU and FAI in Croke Park was a bonanza. And the things we saw. Look! An oval ball flying through the air at Croke Park and then the Boys In Green out on the field playing the garrison game. The Big Snooker in Croke Park! And it was great, it really was.

But every party has to end. There is a jaded feel about the old competition this year. The price of tickets has become the only hot topic of this championship. Even the players are complaining now that the All-Ireland, stretching from mid-May to mid September, is unnecessarily long. Young players are back on the emigration trail. The romance of the qualifiers is over. The players are looking around at the empty seats and the penny is beginning to drop. Heroic though the players were and are still, all those full houses were not people coming to see them, per se.

It was about people in an optimistic and cash-easy time coming to express their pride in their county and to have a bit of fun. Nothing highlights the daftness of the notion of a professional GAA structure like the slow sound of the turnstile clicks this summer. Just like rugby will discover, the GAA acquired quite a few good-time fans in the fast years. And even the traditionalists have to make a decision now about if and when they are going to fork out to see their team play.

The GAA doesn’t panic. It is one of the association’s great strengths. It has been an unreasonably wet June in the midst of a ferocious assault of the economy: of course attendances will be down.

There will be cracking games in July and August on fine dry afternoons. And the All-Ireland finals will, as ever, be the gala occasions: the announcement of autumn.

But that does not mean that the championship is not in need of change. Some year soon, the GAA is going to have to reimagine the All-Ireland championship and make it a bolder and leaner competition. If they leave it as it is, the All-Ireland championship will slowly lose its way. And it is too important and too great for that.

Like the woman in Clones said all those years ago: It is part of who we are.