CHANGES…Cork were up to it this year
‘The important thing is not winning, it’s making everyone else lose’
Tracy Aguilar
IN THE heady world of inter-county GAA, each year brings new and improved disputes between the authorities and the managers as their attempts to second guess the opposition collides with the protocol agreed, signed and understood at committee level.
This year it concerns the naming of teams. Two years ago, Central Council brought in an initiative to ensure that each county team would be named on the Tuesday night before the match. They also decided to finally retire that most versatile and long serving of players, Mr. AN Other, and counties are now banned from naming him.
The reasons for this are simple and genuine. Each day newspapers have about five pages of sport and these have to be filled. The naming of a team early in the week ensures that GAA gets on these pages, because if it’s not GAA, it will be other sports and this summer you could have filled a full paper each day with pointless drivel about Bale, Rooney and Suarez.
When a team is named early in the week it creates discussion; how many debut players are in, are there any big omissions, how will they measure up to the team named by the other county, how does it differ from the League team?
This is particularly true for the first round where the entire GAA public and media await with great interest the new team that has emerged from the ashes of the League. In fact, the entire space between league and championship is usually filled with such speculation and the naming of the teams then ramps up the coverage until the Sunday.
In fairness, most counties abide by this rule and in particular, Armagh embraced it fully, with the team being named live on their own internet TV channel on the Tuesday night before all their games.
But other counties haven’t been just as forthcoming and their evasions have ranged from naming dummy teams, to naming players in wrong positions, to not naming teams at all and just ignoring the pleas to release the names of their first 15. Both of these tactics are totally frustrating and just plain stupid.
In the Munster final for example, Conor Counihan named a team on the Tuesday and by Saturday night at Mass in Mullaghbán, 300 miles away, people could name the three changes that were going to be made. And none of those late changes, Noel O’Leary, Aidan Walsh and Patrick Kelly made any impact on the match, so the only players who were unsettled were the three who came in because of how their preparations for the final were disrupted by the pre-match shadow boxing.
Managers need to realise that the tactic naming someone who secretly won’t be playing won’t make it beyond even the tightest of panels. The reason for this is simple and it involves how the GAA works at club and family level. If you’re named on a team on Tuesday night, the phone doesn’t stop ringing for three days, text messages, good wishes from the club Twitter account, club men, friends, relations, work colleagues; they’re all on wishing you well and no player with even a shred of integrity is going to tell lies to all those trusted people that he will be playing if he is not.
So in the midst of all this interaction, there isn’t the slightest hope that these secrets will be kept. It’s really an insult to the fans, the GAA public, the media, but most of all, the wrongly named player.
He gets the fake nod, the jersey and in some cases they even get to walk behind the band, but then ridiculously they head to the dug out when the nitty gritty starts. I remember in 1993 Danny Quinn, a great friend of mine, got named in the Derry team to play Donegal in the Ulster final, but strong suspicion raged as to whether he was going to play.
Back then the teams used to run out from the building in the corner of Clones where the minors now come out from and as the Derry team walked down the steps, his eye caught mine as I stood on the O’Duffy Terrace. I raised my eyes and he shook his head dejectedly. The week of pretending had taken its toll on an honourable servant who always gave his best, but was now merely a human pawn in a pre-match game of chess. Named at number three, but on that day, just a number.
Managers go all macho during the championship. Spending too much time on football and hurling fields surrounded by testosterone can do that to people. Liam Dunne, the Wexford hurling manager made an astonishing attack on the GAA after he named a completely false team for their match against Dublin.
In fact, to name it a dummy team would be an insult to dummies. Six personnel inaccuracies including the goalkeeper and no less than 14 positional changes. The reason he gave for this was that Dublin had recruited their video analyst before the championship and would know too much about his team.
He went on to say that the GAA don’t give a shite about the second tier hurling teams because they didn’t fix their replay in Croke Park. He obviously wasn’t aware that in a provincial championship, the county themselves decide which stadium they will play their replay in and when Dublin County Board nominated Parnell Park that was their call. Nothing to do with the GAA at either national or provincial level.
Meanwhile Clare hurlers didn’t submit a first 15 at all for their Munster semi-final against Cork which meant that the programme patrons bought in Cusack Park for five euro wasn’t worth the paper it was written on. GAA people buy the programme for the teams and nothing else and when the line out named in it bears no resemblance to the team that plays, they feel cheated. And they’re right too because the programme becomes a crucial piece of the recorded history of the match for players, collectors and fans alike.
It might seem like a small thing and most fans will side with the managers in any collision with the GAA authorities, but when teams aren’t named, there is no GAA news for people to read. And those pages which were set aside to discuss the various permutations of positions and battles, are filled with other codes, our rival sports, jostling for position in a congested space for the hearts and minds of the sporting public.
And in the current climate, there are plenty of other sports ready and willing to offer stories for the media because they have a better understanding of the importance of getting free advertising for their games. And when the GAA at national level meet the media and complain about the lack of coverage, they are told that we need to get our house in order ourselves with regard to the naming of teams.
There will always be tension during the summer between managers and the GAA. It’s a natural outworking of the conflicting roles both sides have. It is understandable also that managers will want to do anything at all to give them that crucial advantage over their opponents. But if managers can get the message that for their team to win, it doesn’t mean that everyone else has to lose, perhaps we can end this nonsense for once and for all.