The Football Championship - A Pageant, Not a Product

The Championship: Philly seems to like it.

Positing the notion that a two-tier Championship is inevitable in Tuairisc earlier this month, the great Dara Ó Cinnéide wondered in passing how anyone could have the idea that the Championship could ever be a level playing field, with county demographics and traditions being what they are.

In light of this, it’s interesting to remember just why the back-door system was introduced in the first place. The original idea was that many teams were denied either the Championship itself or a good long summer run by the vagaries of chance, with the Cork footballers of the 1970s being the most frequently cited example. Had they not had the ill-luck to share Munster at the same time as the Kerry Golden Years team, who knows what could have happened?

And that’s why the back-door was introduced. Not to level the playing field for all, but in the hope that no more should a flower like that Cork team be born to blush unseen, and waste its sweetness on the desert air, as Mr Gray might have put it.

The back-door is with us sixteen years now, and the Law of Unintended Consequences has kicked in. The back-door Championship was introduced at a time that the economy was booming and the enforcement of the GAA’s amateur ethos grew increasingly token. So an initially-flawed idea – Cork were going to have face Kerry at some stage, after all – mutated into an even worse one and left us the mess we have today, where the GAA is having an existential crisis without properly realising it.

The whinging about the format of the Championship that (correctly) bothers Ó Cinnéide is based on the idea that the Championship is a sports entertainment product competing in a marketplace with other sports entertainment products like European Cup Rugby and the English Premier League. But it’s not. It’s something completely, uniquely different to that.

The things that make the Championship great cannot exist as part of a sports entertainment product. The Championship is written about as if the GAA exists to present a sports entertainment product. That is not why the GAA exists. The GAA exists to allow as many people as is practicable to play Gaelic Games as often as they wish. The inter-county Championship is a by-product of those thousands and thousands of games. The Championship is accident; the club games are essence.

This fundamental point is being lost in the hubbub as the GAA striates further between the haves and have-nots, and the separation will get even worse when the Super Eight series are introduced next year. The people running the GAA think the increased revenue will improve the Association. It will not. The increased money will destroy the Association by creating a professional division that will leave the ordinary club players behind. The ordinary club players and members who, after all, comprise the vast majority of the membership of the Association in the first place.

Under pressure of money, propaganda and carelessness the GAA is inching along a road where the needs of elite athletes will be prioritised over the needs of the thousands and thousands of fat bucks, slow bucks, clumsy bucks and hungover bucks who need and deserve the regular games that the GAA can provide them. The prioritisation should be the reverse.

Ewan McKenna, a man never afraid to speak truth to power, tweeted this after Tyrone walloped Derry yesterday:

Please, please, please GAA, bring in two-tier championship. After so much brilliant competitive sport yesterday, I can't watch this mismatch

— Ewan MacKenna (@EwanMacKenna) May 28, 2017

But McKenna misses the point. The GAA isn’t about providing yet another dish to the armchair fan’s sporting feast. The moment its raison d’etre becomes the production of a sports entertainment product it’s all over for the Association.

McKenna will have his two-tiered Championship then. There may be two or three Dublin teams, two or three Ulster, two Connacht, two Munster, two Leinster. They won’t be counties though – they’ll be Lions, or Kestrels, or Wolfhounds instead.

There will be transfers and big money signings. The media will get proper media access, where players will dutifully remark that today’s performance was no surprise as everybody in the unit knew that if they executed their process everything would come right on the day. Hurling will go the way of having grammatical Irish in programmes – a fond yet distant memory.

Is the situation doomed, then? Is there anything that can be done?

Happily, the cause is not yet lost and there is something that can be done. Three things, in fact.

Firstly, close the back door. The Championship is a knockout competition like Wimbledon or World Championship Snooker. If you lose, you lose. Get over it.

Secondly, the GAA needs to remember it’s an amateur organisation, and that means bread-and-water diets for those who’ve been spending like sailors on shore leave. Either a budget cap or, better again, revenue-sharing as in the NFL of the United States. No more lawyering up to escape bans and most of all, proper and painful sanctions for those who would flout these laws.

Finally, it’s perfectly possible to accommodate those who want a more equal inter-county playing field by reconfiguring the League. Three divisions, home and away, promotion and relegation of course, maybe playoffs for the crack. The better players in each county get to test themselves against teams of the same level. The great Kieran Shannon of the Examiner has made the point many times that reworking the League will do more to address the uneven playing inter-county playing field than a hundred tweaks to the Championship.

The League can be run off between January and June, and then July-August-September are free for the pageantry of the Championship. Sports scientists and protein-shake aficionados will know that the best team is the one that does best in the League, while the Championship retains its ancient glory and stays true to the notion that a commoner may challenge a king, and that one crowded hour of glorious life is worth an age without a name.

Kerry on the Cusp of Everlasting Glory

Dara Ó Cinnéide has a fascinating – and frightening, for those who can read the runes – piece in Saturday’s Foinse about Kerry and their three in a row chances this year. On the face of it, Ó Cinnéide was talking down their chances, but the subtext of his piece was clear for those with eyes to see – Kerry are basking in the bright dawn of another golden era, and it’s not three in a row they’re thinking about. It’s five.

The Kerryman, as we all know, is a creature incapable of telling a lie. The only thing is, he tells more than one kind of truth. This is what makes dealing with one so difficult; this duality is what enables the Kerryman to condemn the roughhouse Northern tactics from one side of his mouth, and appoint Paul Galvin as his captain with the other. Therefore, when An Spailpín studies and reflects on Ó Cinnéide’s pieces – and Ó Cinnéide really is the best analyst of football writing or broadcasting today – it’s important to remember that An Cinnéideach speaks to two constituencies, the country and the Kingdom. And while he says the same thing, what they hear – or are meant to hear – in the country is not the same as what they pick up in the Kingdom.

This week Ó Cinnéide is writing about how premature it is to talk of Kerry as three in a row contenders. He marshals three arguments against this contention:

1. Tyrone looked like being lords of all in 2005, and look what happened to them.


2. Monaghan should have beaten Kerry in the quarter-final last summer.


3. Sometimes the best team still loses; vide, 1982.

How endlessly fascinating. Firstly, it can be a source of comfort to the good citizens of the O’Neill and Faithful counties that they managed to annoy the Kerrymen to such an extent. Secondly, and possibly more germane to our current analysis, Ó Cinnéide here offers an unguarded insight into the Kerry mentality.

One of the reasons that Kerry are as successful as they are is that Kerry want it more. Jack O’Connor said after the 2006 All-Ireland that Kerry’s one year of hurt was a greater goad to them than the fifty-years-and-counting were to Mayo, and O’Connor was correct. Thirty-plus All-Irelands or no, every single loss stings the Kerryman. Not only are they bitter about Tyrone a few years ago or that crushing loss against Offaly in 1982, they’re still sore about losing to Down in the sixties. Pat Spillane was bitching about Down in the sixties and they things they didn’t do to poor Mick O’Connell on George Hook’s radio show once; Hooky isn’t enough of a GAA man to ask Pat how he knew, as he would only have been a child at the time.

The bitter tang of defeat is as much a part of the Kerry football heritage as catch-and-kick, Paddy Bawn and Valentia boatmen. Like the Spartans of old, Kerrymen like to see character, and nothing builds character like adversity. As Marvin “Shake” Tiller remarks in Dan Jenkins’ classic American football novel, “Semi-Tough,” it’s not a question of who wants to win, because everybody wants to win. It’s a question of who fears losing the most that makes the difference.

Long time readers of Ó Cinnéide – and it’s to his pieces that An Spailpín always turns first on a Saturday morning – are aware that Ó Cinnéide is sore about the break in the Kerry football tradition that occurred in the late eighties and early nineties, when the golden generation hung up their boots and it wasn’t quite clear who was going to replace them. Ó Cinnéide’s own generation learned that winning is not a right, and traditions don’t just happen, they must be carefully maintained. And the reason that An Spailpín is both swept away by Kerry’s dedication and cowed for his own hopes of seeing his own county win an All-Ireland before it’s time to dance with the Reaper is that Ó Cinnéide clearly senses that Kerry are on the verge of Great Things, and the chance mustn’t be let slip from their grasp.

Ó Cinnéide’s piece on Saturday wasn’t about counties other than Kerry’s chances of winning an All-Ireland this year – it was a call to arms for Kerry to screw their courage to the sticking-post, and prepare for great deeds ahead. Not only have Kerry the best football team in the country, as Ó Cinnéide himself admits, they have profound talent coming through. And they enjoy an advantage that Mick O’Dwyer’s teams did not have, and that is the ridiculous back door system that comforts and protects their imperium. Reader, do you really think that, if the back door existed in 1983, Tadhgie Murphy would not have been fully punished for his temerity later in the summer, or that twelve Dubs would have pushed Kerry around the way they did Galway?

There are a few teams in contention this year. Galway could come good, Derry have been knocking at the door and, being of his generation, An Spailpín Fánach can never quite bring himself to write off Meath. But not only must they match Kerry for players, they must match them for heart. The most chastening thing for the rest of country, looking at Kerry and their football tradition and their tremendous desire and pride in their colours, is that if the current Kerry team do indeed win five in a row, they’ll more than likely deserve it.





Technorati Tags: Ireland, sport, culture, GAA, football, Kerry, Dara Ó Cinnéide