The illumination of holy books during the Dark Ages aside, the GAA is
perhaps the greatest achievement in the history of Ireland – an amateur
organisation that covers all thirty-two counties and inspires enormous amounts
of volunteer input to bind communities and give them a profound sense of
identity. Even the most gifted players
are humble and grounded, an antidote to the preening narcissism of some of their
multi-millionaire soccer counterparts. It is heavily subsidised and jealously
protected by traditionalists and rightly so - it’s good for society.
But the games themselves
puzzle me. I will admit that I do not have a GAA background, and spent many childhood Sundays floating about
outside the rugby club while the dads were getting stink-o. I’m told that hurling works better when you
see it live – while the skill levels are obvious, on TV it just seems like a blur
of sticks and a mostly invisible ball (yes, I know I should call it a sliotar).
I have attended some football matches and enjoyed the hostile atmosphere as
much as the fare on the pitch – at a Tyrone v Down match I heard women swearing
viciously (something I have never heard at a rugby match) and saw a fight
breaking out among Meath fans in a match against Offaly in Croke Park. I keep
an eye on the league and championship results too and always feel a little
excited when May rolls around. I think this is because I pick up on the giddy
tones of the radio presenters whose job, it often seems to me, is to create a
sense of breathless anticipation rather than report on a sports event. How else does one explain the ever-lengthening
pre-match build-up banter that seems to get longer with every year?
But my problem with
Gaelic football is that there only seem to be two or three high quality matches
in the championship every year. That’s
like a box of biscuits that is ten per cent chocolate kimberleys and ninety per
cent digestives. The provincial meetings are consistently low-standard affairs
(the Ulster games have the slight merit of being competitive at least) and genuine
quality doesn’t seem to emerge until the semi-finals. To their credit, the
analysts don’t hide their disappointment but you wonder what the point is of
televising all these poor games. I can’t believe they command high ratings
beyond the viewers from the counties involved.
Come semi-final time, when the wheat has finally been separated
from all that chaff, we get to see the likes of Dublin, Kerry and
Mayo playing what looks like a different sport in Croke Park, with
players who can kick with accuracy and run up big scores in
minutes, players who can produce under pressure, players with
greater awareness of the dimensions of the pitch, who can pick
out their colleagues up the field for an inch-perfect pass. And it
is glorious to behold.
But why can so few
players play gaelic football anywhere near to the standard of Kerry or Dublin?
Why are so many of them unable to consistently kick points from a distance or create
goal-scoring opportunities? The effect is akin to a summer spent watching the
fixtures like Braintree Town against Yeovil and then Barcelona versus Chelsea in
August. Some will protest that player numbers (Dublin) and tradition (Kerry)
give those counties a supreme advantage over the others but surely the also-rans
should have a better grasp of what I would call the basic skills?
Perhaps the missing element is a wider
approach to player development, and the establishment of the sort of academies
that are the norm in rugby. But that would probably be too much of a stretch on
the GAA’s finances. Maybe there should be rule changes to accommodate the less skilful
and make the game more playable for everyone.
Or maybe RTE and Sky should just give up on televising all but the last
seven knock-out matches and leave the other games to local radio and to their counties’
supporters. After all, does GAA, like soccer and golf, need the same kind of
saturation TV coverage that can only expose the frailties and dullness of much
of the content?
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