Sean Moran: Four reasons why the GAA can relax about rugby

By now the GAA is quite practised at coping with big international sporting events involving Irish teams but there was still some apprehension in Croke Park about the potential impact of the current Rugby World Cup.

One official remarked that it was in a way as well that the International Rules test against Australia had been scheduled for November, as it could have been hard fighting the noise generated by Ireland's rugby campaign in October.

Anyway, relations between the bodies have been generally good. They are both 32-county organisations and up until 20 years ago also had in common a commitment to amateurism.

The coming of professionalism didn't radically alter the relationship however and three years ago the GAA laid a number of its grounds at the disposal of the IRFU bid for the 2023 World Cup – happy to show some neighbourliness but equally on the understanding that government grants would be available to help upgrade those venues.

Relaxed attitude

There are some supporters of Gaelic games, who have a thin-skinned hostility to rugby but in my experience the majority of the GAA community have a more relaxed attitude to other sports.

The late Breandán Ó hEithir, author of Over the Bar, once said that the atmosphere after the Ireland-England Triple Crown decider in 1985 was the closest he had experienced to that of an All-Ireland final.

In keeping with the ongoing campaign against the tyranny of having to ‘learn five things’ from virtually every human experience, I list four reasons why the GAA can feel unruffled after the Rugby World Cup.

1Discipline: For years one of the things that used to reflect badly on the GAA when compared with rugby was the issue of discipline. There have been dissidents though and one well-placed volunteer in the Croke Park disciplinary structure remarked a couple of years ago that yellow cards were often a cop-out in rugby and that far fewer red cards than merited were shown as a result of the sin-bin.

Even after a summer that was something of an embarrassment for the GAA in relation to enforcing rules on foul play, Gaelic games lost nothing in the comparison with a litany of lenient failures to cite, perceived disproportion in the punishment of players from the rugby equivalent of ‘weaker counties’ and the freeing of players to play in matches in circumstances that would make Diarmuid Connolly blush.

But the one rugby gold standard to which many in Gaelic games aspired was 'respect for referees'. That was however significantly devalued at the weekend by the fate of Craig Joubert, who awarded a controversial and decisive penalty at the very end of the Australia-Scotland quarter-final. It was a debatable call but that's what referees are there to make.

Some years ago former Kerry captain and manager Mickey Ned O'Sullivan was invited to South Africa to give tutorials on the high-catching of rugby balls. It now appears as if some Wicklow referees also made the journey and advised Joubert on the best lines and angles of running to get off a pitch at full-time.

To put the tin hat on it World Rugby then released a statement hanging their appointed referee out to dry. All we need now to make it completely familiar is for an old-style media campaign calling on Australia to offer a replay.

2 Exposure: There was of course huge interest in Ireland’s fortunes and the television audiences were the biggest rugby has ever attracted. For some of the uninitiated, though, the spectacle came as a bit of shock. One reaction for instance, as anecdotally related, was that the physical contact was very violent.

The physical attrition was significant and appeared to require more recovery time than the week’s interval between matches. Ireland’s ambitions were dashed in the absence of four significant players, missing due to injury.

Gaelic games have also become more physical and gladiatorial in recent years but rugby is off the scale in this context. Concussion is now an issue for the GAA as well as rugby but in the past month there have been two documentaries on the subject in a rugby context, one featuring a neurologist, Professor Ann McKee saying, “I would not want a son of mine playing rugby”.

3 Box office: The GAA has to accept that it can’t appeal to the public in the same way that major international events can but the upside is that the big days in Gaelic games are guaranteed.

Ireland’s rugby team has been more consistently successful in the past two seasons than at any time in nearly 70 years. Can it continue to achieve at that level in order to maintain public interest levels?

On the ground the success of the provinces has been a huge plus for rugby, creating high-profile internationally successful sportspeople in the community. This is however endangered by the new allocation of resources from European competition, posing a challenge to both the prospects of Irish teams and thus the ability of the IRFU to keep its best players here.

4 Still . . . Around the country through its various community programmes Irish rugby is definitely making inroads into areas where it had no previous presence but there are still nearly 10 times as many GAA clubs. But one of the areas where Gaelic games could learn from rugby is in the clarity and smooth running of its fixtures programmes.

The prospect of a professional sports career is enticing for young players but that has always been an issue for the GAA with soccer and, to a far lesser extent, the AFL signing up recruits. Rugby has also been able to offer this but there has also been cross-pollination with even the rugby-playing schools contributing to Dublin’s recent successes.

Live and let live. smoran@irishtimes.com