Shooting ourselves in the foot – condensing All-Ireland Championships isn’t a solution, it’s a dangerous problem

Imagining the rioting scene creates a poison grub sketch in my head.

A seething Keano (uniformed in a full Cork Blood-and-Bandages Wurling costume) stuns Des Cahill by hitting Jimmy Somerville’s high notes while commanding Bronski Beats Tell Me Why in his impassioned plea to the GAA schedulers, himself to explain.

There is a serious point here.

For those of us who view the inter-county GAA summer as one of the hallmark wonders of Irish life, a timeless treasure, flawed but loved and glorified, the shrinking of the calendar is at once inexplicable and dangerous.

It feels unnatural and just plain wrong, a manipulation of the natural order of one of our priceless landmarks.

Not quite to the same extent as defacing the Book of Kells or sticking two gold McDonald’s arches on the Neolithic jewel of Newgrange, but still a form of unwarranted cultural mischief.

This year’s championship is so compressed before it begins, sardine factor ten, that it’s a surprise John West didn’t step in as title sponsor.

With every week that goes by, the madness of unwinding becomes more apparent.

No inter-county games in August or September, the traditional fever months of the season, stealing the not-to-be-missed tradition of thousands of excited schoolchildren dressing up in county colors.

The Hurling’a All-Ireland final will take place on July 17th and will square off on Sunday of the Open Championship where Shane Lowry and Rory McIlroy will hopefully be chasing the Claret Jug. Football takes place a week later, on July 24, when half the population sunbathes on Mediterranean beaches.

Shutting down the shutters on the GAA’s storefront for more than six months while other sporting goods stores continue to operate. A self-defeating boom that can be compared to Dunnes stores closing from July to January leaving Penneys, Aldi and Lidl a gaping abyss in the market.

A separate season between club and district worked well in 2020 but that was almost entirely due to a Covid-induced hunger for games after months of inactivity.

This outlier has been extrapolated to a thesis that squeezing large county games into a few weeks of early summer is a coherent strategy.

2020 was used to create a fiction that club games can fill the late summer/autumn gap.

They can’t, they just don’t have the same reach, don’t draw nearly the same crowds and almost completely bypass the non-GAA affiliated sections of the public that are tuned in to the county games in such large numbers.

It’s entirely possible to marvel at the dedication and commitment of club volunteers, to sympathize with club issues for club players, while understanding that club play is not a mass-market product.

I was at an Adult Division Two game in Dublin recently on a sunny Sunday morning (one of the clubs has several representatives on Dessie Farrell’s County squad) and without subs and management there were maybe 40 people in attendance.

From personal experience, even within GAA circles, interest tends to be narrow-minded – enthusiasm for a club game in Tipp or Kildare or Mayo or Donegal is largely confined to locals in the corners of those particular counties.

One columnist this week spoke of “the fetishization of club play”.

Again, rather than criticizing the club scene, the author was among the many who were confused by taking the unique inter-county experience for granted and the clamor to hide the GAA’s crown jewel in the back of the dressing room.

The club is of course an important and integral part of the association’s essence, but those big county days at Croke Park or Semple Stadium or McHale Park are just as central to enticing youngsters feeding a diet of Anfield or Aviva glamour .

In a world where the GAA is competing for a valuable resource – Irish youth – David Clifford and Gearoid Hegarty are powerful recruiting tools.

And yet the reputation is for confining them to fewer and fewer days in the sun, leaving the stage to the outstanding talents of Mo Salah and Peter O’Mahony.

A fiction is propagated that “real GAA” people somehow can’t care about the county game.

Which begs an inevitable question: who are the TV millions tuning in to Mayo vs. Kerry or Limerick vs. Waterford, or Dublin vs. Tyrone, or Cork vs. Kilkenny?

Or the hundreds of thousands who click the turnstiles so consistently in the summer (entrance numbers at the Muenster slingshot have increased significantly compared to 2019, the last year without Covid restrictions)?

Contrary to one narrative repeatedly circulated, it is possible to invest heavily in the GAA without being an active member of the GAA club.

Attending county games, often traveling great distances and spending big bucks on game tickets, lodging, gas, food and drink, is as legitimate an expression of love for the games as any.

Think of the color that the traveling Mayo hordes, or a Hill 16, or Clones Hill in bloom, have given so many summers.

The suspicion here – backed by a micro-poll of friends split between club and non-club members – is that the club versus county debate has been hijacked by an ardent minority, while the vast majority would prefer to be held on August/September for All-Ireland semi-finals and finals.

Self-destructive clashes between the few truly outstanding county hurling and soccer games are a result of claustrophobia, a marketing strategy that can be boiled down to one sentence: shoot ourselves in the foot.

Additionally, some of the biggest GAA games of the season are lost in the shadow of flagship rugby and football.

This year’s football finals in Münster and Leinster will take place on the last Saturday in May.

On the same day, an enormous number of Irish sports fans will be obsessed with Liverpool versus Real Madrid in the Champions League final and/or should they beat Toulouse this weekend, Leinster in a Champions Cup final.

For these GAA showcases to clash with two of the biggest sporting events on the European calendar – which will rightly dominate sports talks across Ireland throughout the week – seems so utterly unnecessary.

It is certain that this will affect viewership and television audiences and will appear unfair to the county stakeholders involved.

At least it will massively reduce the feeling of the occasion.

A little story from last weekend.

Friends from Kerry moved to one of Dublin’s famous hostels (a city center bar frequented by both GAA and rugby fans on matchday in large numbers) to watch the football semi-finals in Munster.

They were among many from Cork and the Kingdom who stormed out of Munster’s dramatic Champions Cup tie against Toulouse at the Aviva for one of the most iconic games (all it’s diminished by Cork’s relapse) in both Gaelic and Irish sport.

But Cork v Kerry clashed with Leinster v Leicester and the pub only had one Sky/BT box. Rugby was favoured, although bar staff did their best to switch to events at Páirc Uí Rinn to keep an eye on the GAA.

A game that would normally have a Sunday in mid-June to itself – with all the consequent accumulation and hoopla – was cornered by the big beasts on a claustrophobic Saturday night.

This Saturday, Dublin hosts its biggest hurling game in at least three years, a key back-and-forth home game between Leinster and Brian Cody’s Kilkenny.

But what is happening in Parnell Park, while drawing the attention of the slinging partisans, is overshadowed by city-wide events at the Aviva, where Leinster will be chasing that final Champions Cup spot.

With Liverpool and Chelsea meeting in the FA Cup final, Dublin’s landmark hurling day will be, at best, the third biggest sporting story of the day for too many in the city.

Of course, club players should not be denied meaningful games on summer pitches (although the fact that many counties, even with the shortened season, are still running club campaigns well into the fall may be a clue to the real problem).

But squeezing the county season, staging All-Ireland finals in July and tearing down the walls of such a long-standing tradition isn’t remotely the solution.

It shouldn’t take a frothing Keano at The Sunday Game to hammer home such a self-evident truth.