Tighter inter county season needed to give club players a fair chance

The GAA fixtures situation, which sees thousands of club players denied championship action for long stretches of the summer, continues to be a bone of contention. Here, KEVIN EGAN proposes his solution to the perennial problem. As any politician nowadays will tell you, it"s not difficult to diagnose when something is not being done correctly. Ask anyone, politician, economist or window cleaner, about the current financial issues of the nation and they"ll all tell you that something is not right. That bit"s the easy part. Finding the solution, on the other hand, is another matter entirely. So it is in the GAA - there is a huge problem once again coming to the fore, a problem which comes up every single year but never gets resolved because no-one seems to know the solution. We of course refer to the fixtures crisis, the unique situation in Gaelic games where the huge majority of the playing population must sit back and wonder when they will next have a meaningful match all because their county team is not yet eliminated from the All-Ireland championship. Here in Offaly the situation is particularly acute. Due to a peculiarity of the fixture lists, the month of June will see not a single championship match take place for the senior county footballers or hurlers, or any of the adult club players in either code, barring the four intermediate hurling teams of group one, who have a round of games scheduled for a fortnight"s time. Essentially, club players cannot play their championships because of the county team being involved, and yet the county team is lying idle as well - in the meantime, both club and county teams must go scrounging around the country for challenge games because the leagues have already drawn to a close for most participants, even at junior level where county players have little or no involvement. The adult senior football championship is due to start on the second weekend of July, however that is subject to the county football team being eliminated the week before and will be obstructed by the guaranteed involvement of the county hurlers in action around that time. Realistically, it looks highly unlikely that the club championship will be started before August, and even then that likelihood is only because of the poor current form of both inter-county teams. A sustained run for either panel would cause a real headache for the Offaly fixtures committee. Now, let"s look around at other counties. Donegal make their first foray into the Ulster football championship this weekend, and their club championship first round was played almost three weeks ago. Their county team will now take centre stage and it"s unlikely that the club games will resume until the first week in August, meaning that their club players will have had ten weeks between games. Sligo still haven"t made their entrance into the Connacht championship and won"t for another nine days, while their club games have yet to start. Yet no-one is looking at this situation - where neither the club nor the county footballers of Sligo see any championship action until the end of June - and crying stop. Given a half decent run in the qualifiers, Sligo could easily be finishing up their club championships in the depths of October, a waste when one considers that May and June have effectively been wasted. Even if it"s not Sligo in this situation, it will be another county. Every year we see county finals in late October and early November, yet every year we waste the early summer with four or five county games per week, rather than implementing the obvious solution. And the solution is that obvious. Everyone knows that inter-county players are fitter than they"ve ever been, that the level of preparation is greater and that they train and play so much more than players of past generations. Put simply, these men are professional in all but name, and yet the inter-county season is structured as if it were amateur players taking part. If the inter-county championship season started in early May, as it does now, and was played off relatively quickly with an average of two weeks between fixtures for counties, then the provincial championships could be completed by the end of June. The qualifiers and quarter-finals could be completed by the third weekend in July, meaning that counties could schedule their domestic championships to start with a bang on the August bank holiday weekend, or even two weeks before, if it were a county with little anticipation of success. More importantly, players would know this in advance and could plan accordingly. Four counties in each code would be held up by their teams reaching the latter stages of the inter-county season, but with the All-Irelands completed by the third weekend in August, even the winners could run their competitions off in September and October, only one month later than planned. This means that in most counties, club players would get August and September as their time at the very least, two months of dedicated summer time for them to play championship football and hurling with no danger of postponements and switches to mess up their plans. A tighter county season would leave some issues to be ironed out, particularly in the area of the football and hurling teams of the same county playing the one weekend, while TV revenue may also suffer for the shorter season. But neither of these are good reasons to have swathes of club players sitting idle and effectively 'on call' for the entire summer, with no potential to book holidays or set time aside for personal reasons if required. More importantly, training could be specifically targeted towards a 'peak' season' where players would know that they would have to be at their best, rather than the current situation where players must train as if they are playing do or die championship football in June or early July, but may in fact not see action until well into August - a situation which is even more severe in other counties than it is in Offaly this summer. This would also allow longer club league seasons, to be played throughout the peak summer months without county players. County players rarely play league games with their clubs now anyway, and this would save teams the time and expense of organising challenge games all across the country. The farce that was this year"s division three and division four football leagues defied logic in that regard. Players were delighted to see the new larger divisions which seemed to mean a league season containing approximately thirteen fixtures. Instead, each division was split and teams only got seven games - games which are now finished even though there is still at least a month before any championship activity. The GAA, like any large organisation in Ireland today, is beset with several problems. Many of these problems are difficult to overcome, not unlike this issue where the bulk of the membership has their lives dictated to by a short notice culture, whereby one must be available to train and play for months on end with no idea when championship action will be thrust upon you. However, difficulty is no reason not to look for solutions, particularly when they are there to be found. Club members and players are what keep the GAA alive. They are amateur players who take part for the love of the game, and they deserve better than the current structure. They deserve August and September as their time. Let"s give them that.