Limits to growth of Tipperary football may well come from within

In the GAA, the enemy is nearly always within. Progress is far more often stymied – and far more brutally so – by the jealous guarding of local patches than it is by that shower above in Croke Park. We do not have to look very far, ever, to see this in action.

In Tipperary this Sunday, the county football final is down for decision between Loughmore-Castleiney and Moyle Rovers. This is Tipperary, the story of the football summer. Tipperary, who shook up a changeless semi-final line-up by making it to the last four, the first Division Three team to do since Wexford in 2008. Tipperary, a beacon of hope for the footballing down-trodden everywhere.

But because the Munster hurling quarter-final between Thurles Sarsfields and Ballygunner is being played in Semple Stadium, the footballers will face off in Leahy Park, Cashel.

The hurling throws in at 2pm, the football at 2.30pm. So not only can no interested neutrals go to both matches, local radio can’t do full commentary on them both.

The Tipperary County Board set the date and venue for the final on the night of October 16th, after Thurles Sarsfields had won the hurling final. It was already set in stone that Thurles would play the Waterford champions on Sunday 30th, as delicious a club hurling encounter as we might see this side of Christmas.

It is the game of the day anywhere in the country this Sunday, football or hurling.

Turned down

And yet the Tipp football final is up against it, by the county board’s own hand. The football board asked for Semple Stadium and came up with three different ways of playing the final there – on Saturday night, as a curtain-raiser to the hurling on Sunday or delayed to Sunday week – but were turned down on all three counts by the county board.

Worse, there is no big row about it. Shane Brophy of the Nenagh Guardian kicked up a fuss on Twitter and there were a couple of pages of limp enough back and forth on the Premierview forum but it was more a case of embattled deflation than outrage.

“Disappointing but not surprising,” wrote Brophy, a pretty succinct summing up of the lot of the Tipp football follower.

Here’s the thing. Every county is entitled to run their show as they see fit. More than that, every county is duty-bound to act faithfully for their constituency. The cold, bare truth of it is that for all the summer’s heroics, Tipperary is not a football county. The county board can shunt the football final out to the margins easily enough because, frankly, there’s only a small pocket of people who will notice and a smaller one again who will care.

And, by and large, that’s absolutely fine. Tipperary may not be a football county but it’s doing exponentially more for the game than the vast majority of football counties are doing for hurling.

Some football counties can only dream of the underage systems and expertise with which Tipperary produces players for its poor relation sport. The county board in Tipp needs no lectures on supporting the big ball from places where the small ball is seen almost exclusively on television.

But by the same token, they can’t complain when they lose credibility in other areas. It jarred, for example, to find Tipperary first out of the blocks a few weeks back to reject Páraic Duffy’s proposals for the revamp of the football championships. The stated reason was the squeeze it would put on club fixtures – even as Duffy’s outline made it clear that more room would be provided by the shortening of the season – but also that for a county to prosper in the new format, they would need a deep panel.

Essentially, it was a version of the argument that says extra games make it harder for the weaker counties to prosper and plays to the strengths of the stronger ones. Which is almost certainly true. If Duffy’s proposals pass, it will probably take little short of plague to keep Dublin and Kerry out of the last four most years.

Competition duty

But, as the Árd Stiúrthóir himself said the other day, what is the duty of a competition in any sport other than to produce at the end of it the best team as its champion? Only in the GAA do we wring our hands at a competition set-up being tough on the teams who are not best equipped to win it.

The point is, it’s not Páraic Duffy’s job to get Tipperary into an All-Ireland football final. That’s the job of the GAA in Tipperary – if they so wish to do it.

Tradition and culture suggest they do not. If Duffy came up with a competition structure that gave them a bye into the All-Ireland football final every year for the next decade, Tipperary would still be a hurling county at the end of it. And the county football final would still only get into Semple if it wasn’t being used for a hurling match.

We use phrases like “so-called weaker counties” in the GAA as though it was helpful or even desirable to pretend that everyone is equal. This, despite the evidence of our eyes that says it’s just not true.

All counties are not doing the same training, all players are not putting in the same effort, all teams do not have access to the same facilities, the same expertise, the same talent.

But here’s something all counties do have in common – each and every one of them prioritises one code over the other. And that choice manifests itself in a thousand decisions, small and big, conscious and unconscious, from one year to the next.

The growth of Tipp football is not and never will be dependent on competition structures. As with every other county, its ceiling is decided by choices made much closer to home.