ON GAELIC GAMES:It matters little what particular sports the youth of today play – as the end product can be beneficial to all – but variety is the key to long-term success, writes SEÁN MORAN
THE CULTURE wars that are waged around sport can be as absorbing as the games themselves. Saturday’s great sporting odyssey began early for me watching – as is common among columnists – a daughter playing camogie. Conversation with another parent (think of him as a “column facilitator”) turned to the subject of the afternoon’s rugby international.
As is sometimes the case with GAA people he wasn’t hugely pushed about the phenomenon of the successful Ireland rugby team, ascribing it to the sort of hype that occurs when media become fixated on something. He wasn’t being terribly negative, just not really engaged. But he had a fairly sharp focus on the issue of rugby as a competing sport and one currently in the happy position of being successful on an international stage, the one arena where the GAA can’t compete.
International success is a huge marketing tool for a sport, as was seen with soccer in the past 20 years and with rugby in the current decade.
The problem is that it doesn’t last forever and the relevant association needs to make hay energetically during the sunny spells. Gaelic games have a steadier profile, guaranteed big events every year but not hitting the high points that international sport can reach.
This phenomenon is detectable in television ratings. All-Irelands will be the most watched sports in any year where there isn’t a major success for one of the country’s international teams. Saturday’s match, for instance, drew a bigger audience than last September’s All-Irelands but six years ago when Ireland last contested a Grand Slam decider, against World Cup winners-in-waiting England, there wasn’t the same interest – partly, you imagine, because there was little chance of the team actually winning the match but also because the team’s profile was only emerging.
The Munster phenomenon, for instance, is well established and causes concerns about losing market share in what has been traditionally the GAA’s strongest province. But the man I was talking to wasn’t especially fearful; in fact he expressed himself quite content at the way in which he believed rugby fails to maximise its developmental potential because of the power of the traditional schools and the grip they exert on juvenile rugby.
As one of my rugby-literate friends put it: “In the underage game, schools have traditionally been ‘A’ with the clubs about ‘Z’. It’s a bit better than now but still around ‘T’.”
This limits the amount of missionary work that the game can accomplish, given that the schools base is small. There are further arguments about the excessive focus on winning silverware within those schools but that concerns the impact on the roundedness of the skills with which young players develop rather than the process of getting as wide a range as possible involved and also the retention rates once the hot-house years of school are over when only the elite few will get contracts with one of the provinces.
Gaelic games operate differently in one respect. There isn’t the same emphasis on the schools, although all of their competitions are obviously competitive. The club remains the primary cradle of talent.
In Kilkenny, for instance, where the juggernaut of emerging hurling talent continues to roll, there is strict insistence that juveniles not miss club activity to train with county development squads.
The idea is that although only a fraction of the hundreds who are called up to development squads will actually go on to have careers at the elite, intercounty level, all of the others will be in a position to return to their clubs as better players and make an enhanced contribution.
Another drawback of the power of the schools in rugby is that it amplifies the perception of exclusivity. Saturday’s starting 15 contained just one player, John Hayes, who wasn’t a product of the schools system.
There remains concern that as a professional sport now enjoying considerable success, rugby will be in a strong position to continue the process of diverting players who would otherwise play football or hurling. Scrumhalf Tomás O’Leary is the beacon for such apprehension, having captained Cork to All-Ireland minor hurling success.
There have been many successful crossovers since Moss Keane became the first rugby international from a GAA background in the aftermath of the ban on foreign games being lifted in 1971. It’s ironic that O’Leary’s background is in hurling given that football provides a skill set probably closer to rugby than any other sport.
David Beggy played both at a high level, winning All-Irelands with Meath and representing Leinster. I remember talking to him about the reasons for this adaptability and he made the point that in football players have to do a lot of individual thinking.
Rugby is a more controlled game, less multi-dimensional in the tactical sense because of the restrictions imposed by the offside rules. Positions have detailed requirements whereas football is more independent and requires what rugby calls “heads up” play.
He also said it can work the other way in that rugby gives a player a sense of directness and an urgency when his team loses possession plus an awareness of running channels, which Beggy himself certainly exploited as a footballer. But it is significant that the crossover process hasn’t been all one-way.
Last week it was widely commented on that on the same day Kilmacud Crokes were winning a second club All-Ireland with the assistance of four past pupils of schools rugby leviathan Blackrock College, Mark Vaughan, Mark Davoren, Cian O’Sullivan and Niall Corkery, the school was winning its umpteenth Leinster Cup.
It’s less noted that this was actually the second year that such a crossover was visible, as St Vincent’s pair Ger Brennan and Tiernan Diamond were alumni of Belvedere College, which won the 2008 schools cup.
This sort of cross pollination would have been unheard of in decades past and illustrates the inroads that the GAA, for all the worry about its struggle to thrive in all urban areas, has made into the previously barren terrain of middle-class Dublin, one of rugby’s principal strongholds.
I can remember the first time I heard the argument being stated that sedentary pursuits such as PlayStation, not other sports, were the real competition for Gaelic games. It was former Wexford manager Liam Griffin over eight years ago and he said he could sell football and hurling far more easily to a kid already playing sport than to one immobilised on his couch in front of a video game.
It remains an indisputable truth. Children should be encouraged to play a variety of sports. They will gravitate towards the ones they are best at and the GAA, with its advanced social infrastructure, has nothing to fear from the opening up of sporting choice.
Nonetheless, as GAA director general Páraic Duffy argued in yesterday’s annual report there is a real danger for games in the Government’s requirement to cut back on public expenditure, specifically the threatened paralysis of school sports caused by the withdrawal of cover for teachers who have to supervise such activities.
In times of adversity there should be more to unite people rather than divide them. That also applies to sports organisations.