THE GAA’s calendar issues remind me of a neighbour from home.
One Saturday afternoon when her daughters were teenagers, she sent them down to their rooms to clear them out and dump anything unwanted.
So the eldest lands up the hall, heading for the bin with this pair of shoes.
“Where are you going with those?”
“They’re for the bin Mammy.”
“Don’t throw those out, they’ll do for running about in.”
Tutting, the teenager heads back to the room with the half-tattered brogues in her hand.
Two minutes later, she comes up the hallway again with the empty box the shoes had come in.
“Where are you taking that?”
“The bin, it’s a shoebox.”
“Don’t throw out that good shoebox, I’ll use that to keep stuff in.”
No race of people hoard better. It’s one thing to want the place tidied up, but another entirely when it comes to actually throwing things away.
The GAA are that mother. They talk about needing to condense the calendar but the place is full of old shoeboxes, and there simply isn’t enough room for everything they want to keep.
When the recent Fixtures Calendar Review Task Force was put in place, the picture was painted that they would have a blank canvas to work off.
Instead, they walked into a cluttered mess and were asked to tidy the place up. The most restrictive condition placed upon them was that they weren’t allowed to throw anything away.
Take the potential annual load of an inter-county player.
Pre-season cup. Sigerson Cup. National League. Provincial championship. All-Ireland series. Club league. Club championship. Provincial club championship. All-Ireland club championship.
There is a hugely variant scale in terms of the number of games they might play, dependent on the progress of their respective teams. That’s part of the problem.
A county player can spend 11 months of the year slogging five or six times a week, totting up 200 training sessions while playing maybe 15 games if they’re lucky.
Equally, in the case of Brendan Maher or Con O’Callaghan or any of the truly unique Slaughtneil dual players, there might be 40 games in a calendar year, which is a huge strain on the lives and bodies of those men.
The county game is the elephant in the middle of the cluttered room. Nobody else has room to breathe around it.
It’s talked about as taking up eight months of the year, from January to August, but for players it is a full-year round pursuit. The advent of the tiered structure will elongate the summers of the weaker counties, all of whom have been in pre-season training since early October.
The GAA centrally knows this, and yet every time the fixtures task force came up the hall with a shoebox, they were sent back down.
Worse, they were sent down with something in their hand.
The U20 championship in summer was a disaster for the club game. Moving it back to February and March was, in itself, a grand idea.
Except Central Council voted to introduce a league alongside it, to play the games on weekends rather than midweek, and to give county managers the right to pull in secondary school students still involved in the MacRory Cup despite having made a rule not two months ago saying the exact opposite.
The GAA does not want to throw out anything belonging to the inter-county game. The simple, unmistakable reason for this is that it makes them so much money.
Their obsession with it has become an alienating stance. Take the decision to charge supporters £19 in to watch a National League game at the weekend.
And their insistence on retaining everything from pre-season through to replays for All-Ireland finals, meant that the fixtures task force didn’t stand a chance.
The long years of nothingness are part of what has driven so many players away this winter. The most serious case is in Cavan, who are without almost half of their starting championship team from last year, a season in which they reached a first Ulster final for almost two decades.
Ten months of training, every year for a decade, to take one step forward and three back? And half of them travelling from Dublin, or the other half travelling to Dublin, for training.
They are, as Mickey Graham has repeatedly said, not the only county facing such a crisis but theirs is the most extreme tale.
The miracle is that it’s taken until now for players around the country to start revolting.
There is not room for the inter-county and club games to cohabit as they are now.
It’s an angry marriage that is heading for an irreparable fracture.
The pre-season competitions for county teams have to go. Sigerson Cup has to, at least, have very strict restrictions placed in terms of the number of county players allowed per team.
Development squads must be banned below U17, and the minor and U20 championships must be in midweek, straight knockout with no leagues, and solely for development.
Let the clubs develop the players, and have county boards start pouring their finances into that rather than into elite squads of 25 men that then up and leave in their mid-20s, if not before it.
Bring the Allianz Leagues forward, start them the first week of January and play them off over eight weeks.
Start the championships in March. Have more games in a shorter timeframe and have the county scene finished up by the end of June at the latest.
The clubs need room to breathe. Schools need room to breathe.
The players themselves, most importantly, need room to breathe.
A clean-up gets nowhere unless it’s ruthless.
