Ciarán Murphy: Time for club players to get deserved respect

Weeks of protracted negotiation had failed to broker an agreement between myself and my girlfriend, and so it came to pass that on the morning of a Galway senior club championship game in Tuam Stadium a number of years ago, I woke up in a tent in a field in Goodwood in Sussex, at a festival.

I got a flight to Dublin, shared an Aer Arann flight from Dublin to Galway with Jedward and just two other passengers (I still can’t believe that route no longer runs.), lost my place on the team, came on and played terribly, unsurprisingly, lost the game, and nearly got ex-communicated from my family. It was the last game of senior championship football I ever played . . . unless next year is the big comeback year.

We all have our sob stories to tell, as GAA club players. The weddings missed, the holidays booked and then cancelled, the minor muscle tear in September that took three weeks to recover from and which meant that, after nine months of effort, you missed all four games in your championship year.

The situation in Mayo earlier this summer, when a round of club games was fixed and then cancelled after the All-Ireland semi-final win over Tipperary, was just the latest in a long line of situations where county boards write cheques to their club players that their butts can't cash. But there are ways around this.

A number of years ago, the GAA ensured that there would be a number of weekends, after the intercounty league finals but before the championship began, solely for club activities.

This sounds like a good idea, but is in fact very damaging. There is nothing in the world more senseless to me than the parade of club teams meeting up on New Year’s Day, making promises to each other about how what we did last year won’t be good enough this year, everyone re-doubling their efforts . . . when the sole reason for that meeting happening in January, and not April, is one solitary round of games in May.

Peak physical condition

Why decide clubs have to be in peak physical condition in May, and then condemn them to a purgatory of inaction for 12 weeks? No club player should be out training in January. The club year should be as follows. Training starts in April. Club league games start in June – with, or without your county players. Instead of promising to lasso the moon for the club player, give it to him straight, your championship year starts on August 1st. You can start training for that in January if you like . . . but it wouldn’t make a whole lot of sense.

If the two All-Ireland finals are finished with by the second Sunday in August (Which is absolutely possible, since I shaved two weeks off the intercounty seasons as it is just a couple of paragraphs ago.), then everyone has the autumn and winter to play their club championships. All but the two counties involved in the All-Ireland might even be able to start their club championship in mid-July.

We would then have eight months to get from the first round of the club county championship to St Paddy’s Day, which is when the All-Ireland club final must be played.

Successful clubs

Instead of asking successful clubs to play six weeks in a row to go from winning a county final to winning a provincial final, why not spread the games out a little more evenly?

Move the provincial club finals into January if you think you don’t have time to play them before Christmas. Whether we like it or not, club football and hurling is a winter sport now. Why not just put it in the rule book?

The accepted wisdom would say that the least the ordinary club player deserves is to be rewarded for their nine or 10 months of sacrifice with a solid calendar of games across the entire year.

Well, they’re never going to get that, so would it not make more sense for the club player to just . . . not train for nine or 10 months? Unless you’re getting to the All-Ireland semi-final or final? End the hypocrisy of “a full summer of games for club players”. It’s not going to happen, and dangling the carrot of the possibility of it happening is just hugely frustrating for everyone involved.

It also makes it easier on the intercounty player too – by properly drawing the line between club and county commitments, by condensing the intercounty season and helping their training-to-games ratio as well, and by ending the tug-of-war between the county board, the clubs and the intercounty manager.

The only problem is that the club player might resent being officially relegated to the status of a second-class citizen of the GAA world. But there are few club players left out there who don’t realise that’s what they are already.