Dublin defeat highlights GAA's existential crisis as gulf laid bare
By Kevin Egan
There’s little need here to break down last Sunday’s Leinster SFC semi-final in Croke Park to any great degree, because the result (3-22 to 0-11), and the flow of scores, speaks for itself. Offaly didn’t play particularly poorly, but the gulf in power, fitness and strength in depth was plain to see.
At least a half a dozen Offaly players came out of the game with their reputations enhanced, and there’s no doubt that the likes of Lee Pearson, Cormac Egan and Keith O’Neill are now beginning to scale the sort of heights that everyone would have hoped for when they first burst onto the scene.
Yet it’s notable that out of the Dublin U-20 team that Offaly beat in the Leinster final three years ago, only Lorcan O’Dell played a part in Sunday’s senior semi-final. The youngest player on the starting XV on Sunday was corner-back Seán McMahon, at 26 years of age. Dessie Farrell is in a position where he can take the brightest prospects out of any U-20 team and put them in his panel to serve a three or four year apprenticeship, and since the rewards for playing for Dublin are so great in terms of sponsorship and career opportunities, players will happily bide their time and do just that.
Less than 22,000 supporters paid into Croke Park for the game and that has been the focus of much of the angst over the past week, and certainly there is a strong case to argue that Kildare should have played Louth in Navan, while either Portlaoise or even Tullamore should have been the venue for Offaly’s tilt at the All-Ireland champions.
But the problem facing the GAA runs much, much deeper than that when it comes to the gulf between the elite teams and those, like Offaly, that are doing a lot right, but simply don’t have anything like the same level of natural advantages.
There is no system that would have denied players like Ciarán Kilkenny, Brian Fenton, Stephen Cluxton, Michael Fitzsimons and Con O’Callaghan multiple All-Irelands – their talents would have shone through in any system – but nobody could look at what happened last Sunday and feel happy about what has been created either.