Addressing Inequality in the Football Championship

The Championship has never been equal. The hurling is the more unequal of the two major codes in Gaelic Games, with three counties holding 75% of the All-Irelands, but that doesn’t seem to get the same why-oh-why coverage about inequality.

Maybe football gets more coverage because it’s played more widely or because, football being a simpler game than hurling, people always think every county has some sort of a mullocker’s chance at football. Mullocking will never save you hurling against Kilkenny, but playing Kerry on your patch on a horrible day – well, men can dream, can’t they?

Maybe that’s why the current inequality seems so traumatic. Even though the Championship is built on counties, and counties have never been equal, in either population or football tradition, there was always that chance of dogs having their days. Now even that is gone. The other reason has to do with the state of the modern Championship, of course. We’re four weeks in now and nothing’s happened. Nobody’s lost. They’re all still there, waiting.

So what to do, with this inequality built into the system? People write in newspapers or post on message boards about new Championship formats, some of them quite byzantine in their complexity, but none of them address the basic inequality, that some counties are bigger than others and always will be.

To find out if inequality is an issue, the GAA has to ask itself what is the Championship really for. Is it to achieve the highest standards in athleticism, or is it partly that, but more so a pageant of county’s pride and heritage, where the flying of the colours is more important than winning or losing?

If it’s the former, what will that entail? Do we do away with county boundaries? Do we amalgamate counties, redraw provinces, introduce a transfer system, go professional? Will Irish children support teams in the future the same way they support English soccer teams now and in your youths, through dumb luck with no local connection, no pride of place? Is there any turning from this road, or is it an inevitable evolution?

Your correspondent hopes not. Your correspondent, dreadful old Tory that he is, misses the nobility and the honour of the old Championship, when it was all about representing home, hearth and heart in one ball of white summer heat.

All that is gone now. Now, not only are the historical haves and have-nots with us, but the gap is now greater than just population and tradition. The gap has increased exponentially by the new professionalism that exists in the game, where scientifically devised methods of training have created a new breed of footballer playing a new type of game.

Workrate is the buzzword in football now. Workrate is what you have to up when there’s some buck in a suit standing at your shoulder in the office with a clipboard ticking off how many times us visit Facebook or the GAA Board or, God save us, An Spailpín Fánach, that well-known blog on contemporary Irish life, when you should be filling your spreadsheets or writing your few yards of code. Football is meant to be about glory, drama, fun – all those things that work is not.

How did it come to this? An arms race, at the start. County A starts spending X pounds a year on the county team, with dieticians and GPS trackers and psychologists and what have you. County B has to catch up, so they sign up for all that and throw in cryogenic chambers and bonding sessions in upscale resorts and motivational speeches from retired rugby players. And then County C have someone fly home from ‘Merica on his private jet with a slideshow and a bag of used bills and a plan to set up the old homestead on the map, yes sir, you see if I don’t. And then County A realises it’s fallen behind again and – well, you get the picture.

That creates one level of division. What really stretches it is that this new level of training has created a football that isn’t really recognisable as football any more. None of the great teams of the past could live with a modern All-Ireland contender. If a modern team played Eugene McGee’s Offaly of the 1980s, the modern team would eat Offaly without salt.

Spit and sinew was the underdog’s only chance against the big gun. Now, it’s the big gun’s chief weapon. Offaly’s skill level would couldn’t for nothing against the modern team’s workrate, and there weren’t many soft boys on that Offaly team. It’d be like fifteen frogs being fed into a combine harvester. Whirr, splat.

The rules have failed to evolve with the greater physicality of the men playing the game at the highest level. And it’s only through the rules that change can come, and some of balance can return between physicality and the more finesse type skills of the game.

Perhaps there should be rule differences between county games and club games? There is already a time difference – why not introduce a few more differences? Limit handpasses, redefine the tackle, be less naïve about tactical fouling. Identify the true skills of the game and reward them. It’s not that hard to do if people put their minds to it.

This isn’t about punishing good teams to level a playing pitch. The greater team must always beat the lesser, but that greatness must be because they are greater at football, and not because they are better at pumping iron or at eating more boiled chicken for breakfast.

FOCAL SCOIR: Second Captains let themselves down badly on their podcast of last Tuesday week by having a crack at Leitrim’s potential place in the last twelve of the country. “Leitrim playing into the middle of July having not played a county from Ireland … [compared to Tyrone], who have just engaged in a war with the best team in the country and now have to win three Qualifiers to get to the same position. I mean, it’s just utterly ridiculous.”

Your faithful narrator doesn’t get how beating New York and London makes Leitrim children of a lesser god. How is that a lesser achievement than Kerry also being in the last twelve having beaten Waterford and Tipperary by a combined total of 6-39? Either county can only dance with the girls in the hall.

Leitrim aren’t even in the Connacht Final, but if they do make it it’ll mean the world to them. A provincial final appearance means less than nothing to Kerry. The Second Captains should pick on someone their own size.

The So-Called Weaker Counties

“It’s hard to know what either county got out of this,” reflected Colm Parkinson on Newstalk after Mayo wiped out Leitrim in the Connacht semi-final on Sunday. Parkinson went on to remark that the current competitive structure is unfair, and that there ought to be a competition for the so-called weaker counties to play in while the top brass went on to contest the All-Ireland series.

There are odds of a gobstopper against a ticket to Australia on Martin Breheny doing a why-oh-why on this very topic in Wednesday’s Indo. After all, all he has to do is change the names and the dates. It’s what you’d call your perennial.

There is once group of voices that are always silent in this, and it is that of the so-called weaker counties themselves. Part of this could be pride, of course; nobody wants to break ranks and say I’m hurting, please give me the salve of an Intermediate Competition. A Baby Sam.

Then again, it’s reasonable to think that if the so-called weaker wanted such a competition they would have organised one by now among themselves. It’s not like you have to play in the All-Ireland football Championship. Kilkenny don’t, and Clare withdrew from the Senior Football Championship for a year or two after the infamous Milltown Massacre of 1979.

So maybe – and this is only a guess now – maybe the so-called weaker counties are playing in the Senior Championship, even though the prospect of a day like Sunday is very real at all times, because they want to. Maybe they think pride in the jersey is bigger than winning or losing.

It’d certainly make for an interesting Connacht Final in a few weeks’ time if Parkinson’s suggestions were implemented, and the so-called weaker counties were saved from themselves. Sligo are currently in the Connacht Final but they’ve only ever won three Nestor Cups in their history, just one more than Leitrim. And Mayo is a hot four to one on to retain the Connacht title.

Better to protect Sligo, and the delicate sensibilities of the Commentariat, and have Sligo delicately shunted into some competition played out of harm’s way in Carlingford or somewhere. The 2012 Connacht Final could then simply be awarded to Mayo in a walkover, by right of noble birth, or Mayo’s fellow super-power Galway could be plucked from the qualifiers to play in the Connacht Final instead. That way, we could all pretend that Sligo didn’t upset any apple carts at all by forgetting their station and sending the aristocrats of Galway to the guillotine by the very own seaside on the 9^th of June.

Hard to see anyone from Sligo buying that two-bed apartment.

An assumption seems to have become widespread in recent years – and the RTÉ pundits have played a big part in spreading it – that the football Championship is falling to bits. Teams in Munster and Connacht don’t get enough games. Teams in Ulster and Leinster get too many. Teams in the qualifiers have an advantage over the provincial champions. The provincial champions have an advantage over the teams in the qualifiers. I don’t like it when it’s hot, I don’t like it when it’s not. Wah, wah, wah.

This childish level of analysis obscures the truth about the Championship and the true nature of the thing. It is this. The Championship is not a professional sports competition. If it were, there would be the Champions League style format and relegation/promotion and a transfer market and games on Sky and equality and maybe even cheerleaders and hot dogs.

The Championship is a cultural competition first and a sporting competition second. Yes, there is a Champion every September and yes, games are played but the true worth of the Championship is in its recognition of place and that all counties are held in equal esteem.

Whether the land is arable, pasture or slathered in concrete, whether they have hills or mountains or lakes, all counties have a day when they send their best to represent the people of that county.

The teams march behind the bands to say we are from this place; this place has helped to make us what we are, and we would not have it any other way. What happens after the band disperses and the ball is thrown in secondary to the expression pride of place, identity, history and culture that the Championship uniquely provides.

Declan Browne reflects the true heart of the GAA. Browne realised that his Tipperary birth was worth more to him than a cupboard of medals with somewhere that was not Tipp. For Browne, medals were temporary but the Premier was forever.

Players come and go, games are forgotten and heroes grow old but pride of place goes on and is passed on, through good times and bad, highs and lows, boom and bust. The people who realise that are the true All-Ireland Champions. Mo dhúchas, abú.

Well Done The Sunday Game, the Most Important Program in Ireland

Des Cahill’s Sunday Game goes from strength to strength. Cahill’s tenure in the most important job in Irish television got off to a wonderful start last year when his effortlessly amiable manner put GAA men at ease, as opposed to the Defcon 1 necessary for a chat with Cahill’s immediate predecessor, Pat Spillane.

The standard of analysis on The Sunday Game is so much better than it was too. Rather than ape what’s emerging as the RTÉ Sport house style of forming panels along the Contrarian/Someone with a clue model, Cahill allows his panelists to share what they know from lifetimes in the game. Not all the panelists are great of course, but still. It’s a start.

Last night Cahill rose to another challenge, and he deserves credit for it. Sligo v Leitrim was never likely to be a feature game when Kerry, Cork and Kildare are all playing. The fact that people expect their TV sports presented in a certain way makes it hard on Irish broadcasters too, because the GAA, to its glory, is not a professional sport.

It exists in a different sort of reality and the Irish media hasn’t really come to grips with finding the correct voice for that, a voice that finds the balance between the journalist’s duty to report facts, and common decency’s duty not to hammer a guy who did his best and has to go to work in the morning. It’s very hard to strike a balance between the marquee needs of television and the pride of village needs of the ordinary GAA person.

But last night The Sunday Game came up trumps. They can’t have been expecting the story of the day to happen in Markiewicz Park on Sunday morning but it did and The Sunday Game were able to change their schedules to accommodate it.

Again, it doesn’t seem like much, featuring Leitrim’s triumphant win over Sligo first in the show rather than down the order, but it was something that was beyond the Sunday Game’s newsroom colleagues at six and at nine o’clock.

Is this because RTÉ have upped their game in the light of Newstalk’s challenge on the radio? It’s possible, but it doesn’t matter. All that does matter is that there is a rising standard in the way the games are covered. Each can make the other better by forcing excellence, instead of settling for the mediocrity that comes from monopoly.

Your correspondent was contacted on Twitter during the weekend over some robust criticism of a GAA piece on The Journal on Friday night, since taken down. My friend told me, in not so many words, that we have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God and, as such, perhaps I shouldn’t have gone so medieval in my remarks.

And I take that on board. Few things are as hateful as bullies. But it’s also important to have standards and if we don’t excoriate the mediocre we can never identify the good. So hail, then, The Sunday Game, for not going through the motions and giving Leitrim their due.

GAA isn’t like other sports. There is nothing more local than the GAA and it’s from this local rivalry that the organisation derives its great strength. The GAA doesn’t exist in the same world of glamour as English soccer or European rugby. But for the people of Roscommon and Letrim in the joyous three weeks of anticipation ahead of them, it’s Heaven descended unto the Earth.

The GAA means nothing in the world of Eurovision or X-Factor or Glenda and Rosanna. It exists somewhere else; in shops where people get messages, marts where farmers look and don’t buy, bars that sell pints of special and locals keep money for funeral pints in jars. It’s outside church gates and chip shops and petrol stations and all the places where people meet to talk and ask well; how do you think they’ll do on Sunday? It’s a magical place, really. I think they call it “Ireland.”

Support the Philly McGuinness Memorial Park

This day week is the first anniversary of the death of Philly McGuinness. Philly McGuinness was a 26-year-old engineer from Mohill, County Leitrim, who had his whole life ahead of him when he togged for Mohill in a league match against Melvin Gaels with his brothers on Saturday, April 18th, last year.

There is no more typical vignette of Irish rural life than the men of a football family playing for the parish in a league game. All of the brothers had played for the county; they knew what they were about. There was no reason for this to be any different than any of the other league games Philly had played or had ahead of him.

But it was different. At some stage during the course of the game Philly took a knock, as happens in football. The knock was bad. He hit his head, and everybody knew he was in trouble. Philly McGuinness was rushed to Sligo Hospital and then on to Beaumont in Dublin but he never regained consciousness. He died on April 19th, 2010.

The club hasn’t forgotten him, and doesn’t plan to. The Mohill GAA Grounds have been re-named in his honour and memory, and the club are organizing a draw for this Easter weekend to raise funds for the redevelopment.

Contact details for anyone who wants to buy a ticket are available on the Philly McGuinness Facebook page. Ring the mobile number or drop them a mail and they’ll sort you out. The prizes are worth winning too, with a ten grand total prize fund, two weekend breaks in Lough Rynn and the Landmark Hotel in Carrick-on-Shannon, and spot prizes too.

We hear so much chat about the GAA and what it means. Martin Breheny will almost certainly churn out another of his why-oh-why pieces about why the GAA doesn’t market itself better between now and the League Final. Clubs like Mohill don’t need the GAA marketed to them, but we, the nation, need GAA clubs like Mohill possibly more than ever before as we fight for our very survival as a nation.

God have mercy on those whom He has called home before their time. Ar A dheis go raibh anam uasal Philly, sásta saor ó gach buartha an domhain crua seo.