RATHER than digest the propaganda emerging from the GAA around Páraic Duffy’s proposals, one Ulster county recently took it upon themselves to do a study on its exact impact on the club game.
Taking the dates given to them by the proposed new calendar and trying to put their 2016 games into it, that county found their county players would be unavailable for at least three more club league games than last year.
They also found that it would be impossible to complete the club league fixtures before the club championship begins.
In many counties, not least in Ulster, promotion and relegation are still decided via club leagues. If they are not concluded by the time the championships start, they become a farce.
Who wants to ever play a relegation play-off at the end of November? And who ever wants to end up in that play-off because you hadn’t got access to your best players?
It’s all well and good to tell counties to base their ups and downs on championship but then what are the leagues for? No county players, no promotion or relegation – it becomes a series of glorified challenge games.
In Tyrone last year, there were four ‘starred games’ in the top flight of club football. It’s a county that tries to do its best by a fiercely competitive club scene while maintaining a strong presence in the All-Ireland series. They manage it better than most.
Keeping all masters happy is not easy but what do you think will happen to the number of starred league games if Tyrone’s inter-county campaign is squeezed tighter, but only ends three weeks earlier?
Their fierce, and just, protection of the straight knock-out championship lends itself to some wonderful autumnal drama, but consider among it the plight of someone like Peter Harte.
For the last three years running, his club Errigal Ciaran have been knocked out in the first round of the Tyrone championship, twice in-a-row by Killyclogher, and by Clonoe before that.
That’s one club championship game a year for their star turn. And under the new proposals, the number of league games he played in 2016 would be eaten into.
The community has ploughed a fortune into the wonderful facilities up in Dunmoyle. Great clubhouse, great stand, great pitch. Errigal Ciaran’s coaches invested years into his development.
All to produce the best young players they can.
Instead, Peter Harte would become a Sunday stranger on their own patch, through no fault of his own.
That is no less true for him than it is for Conor McManus in Monaghan or Stefan Campbell in Armagh. It’s the same everywhere.
The current calendar is a handy excuse for the counties that don’t want to promote club football. But for those that do, the proposed new one is a death knell.
Jonny Cooper pretty much summed the problem up at a press conference last week. That the Allstar full-back was able to so easily pull the number of club games he’d played last year from his mind and put it on the tip of his tongue was worrying in itself.
That the number was four would only have been surprising had it been higher. His answer uncovered the very beating heart of this whole issue, which will be put before counties in just under four weeks.
If the proposals are passed, the number of games Jonny Cooper will play for Na Fianna in 2019 will be even fewer, and the same scenario will pass itself around the country.
Congress signing this deal will not see a return of inter-county players to the club fields of Ireland.
What the right hand giveth, the left taketh.
Where do you think the three weeks they’re trimming back off the end of the All-Ireland series are going to come from?
The last weekend of the National League proper would be April 3, as it was last year, but the preliminary round of the Ulster Championship is down for May 1, some two weeks earlier than in 2016.
It’s not only those two weeks that will be lost to the clubs, but most likely that entire block between National League and Championship. In some counties, that is the window in which they start their club championships.
Beaten All-Ireland finalists Mayo are in that band, having played their first round of games on the weekend of May 14 last year. They played another in June, but even that didn’t save them from a very public row over its continuation.
In the end, Castlebar played seven weeks in-a-row before they eventually lost in extra-time to Corofin. A club that’s lost two All-Ireland finals and would justifiably say they could have gone one better this year.
Men like their CCC chairman Seamus Tuohy can’t be blamed for seeing no other option. With Páraic Duffy meeting the latest appointment of his whistlestop tour around the counties to canvass support for his Championship reform proposals, he had addressed delegates when Mayo county chairman Mike Connelly took to the floor.
The head of the county board told a floor packed with delegates from almost every club in the county: “I think we’d be daft not to support these proposals.”
When Connelly had sat down, the chairman of Mayo CCC spoke. Seamus Tuohy, the man that deals day and daily with the club fixtures in Mayo, warned of the impact of those quarter-finals on the club leagues.
But the higher the role, the more weight the words carry. And so Mayo’s delegates all left Castlebar late last Wednesday night with their county set to vote in favour of the proposals, whether they liked it or not.
That is deeply concerning.
The scenario for Mayo club football in 2019 is no earlier championship rounds and running it off in an even tighter blitz format. Same for each of the other seven counties that reach the last eight of the All-Ireland series.
Castlebar would go from playing seven weeks running to playing nine-in-a-row instead.
That’s not to start begging the question of how the GAA intends to fit those magnificent provincial and All-Ireland club championships in before the end of the calendar year.
The CPA were labelled as “contradictory” for their statement but they got it just right. They don’t have the answers yet, but that isn’t a reason to push what’s on the table through.
Club players have had decades of settling and a yes vote on February 28 would be terminal to their hopes of an actual solution.
They want matches. They want a settled calendar. They want their fixture dates to be reliable.
But the clubs themselves also want to play in meaningful, competitive competitions with their best players permitted to at least turn out an odd time.
Páraic Duffy’s proposals do not give them that. They actually take the dream further away.
