Since the winner is inevitable a portentous tone is difficult when it comes to the escalating battle between player power and official control within the GAA.
It really shouldn’t be a battle at all. The recent ructions in Galway hurling and Mayo football are merely the latest instances of county board administrations struggling to reconcile being in control with players actually having the power.
It is a power rooted in two fundamentals – no one has ever paid through a turnstile to watch a county board suit run around, and amateur players get to choose what they do. You would imagine this to be self-evident but major reverberations come from acknowledging it in terms of the GAA’s self-image.
Nevertheless the reality behind the image is that it requires real neck from county board Gaels to presume to tell elite senior players keeping the organisation’s financial clock ticking over what to do.
It is beyond parody. Only in Ireland could ‘sagas’ be constructed out of amateur sportspeople presuming to have a say in who coaches them. Anywhere else, anyone presuming otherwise would have been told to go bite the big one long ago.
Admittedly you do have to be a bit of a weirdo to play inter-county; flogging your guts out for matches five months away, living like Cistercian monks for nothing bar the dubious thrill of comparing flagellation scars and feeding off-the-record quotes about the torture of existence in strait-jacketed purgatory.
Amateur sport
But for Christ’s sake, people, chase up those spine donors. These tales of player woe are getting real old. You have the power. If amateur sport isn’t about those playing it then what else is it about?
Well officially it’s about community of course, the GAA’s foundation stone. It’s about who and what you represent with the stars being one-of-us, living lives recognisable to the rest of us during the week before performing miracles at the weekend. Except at elite level this has been passé for years. Players now lead lives so Calvinist as to be unrecognisable to anyone else. The reality of intercounty participation has moved on. Yet the hierarchy remains much the same; suits picking the tracksuits picking the team.
Such control was a given, Gaels grimly climbing the greasy political pole not only had to be in charge, but be seen to be in charge. And part of the deal was choosing who to put in charge of county teams.
What those same Gaels struggle to come to terms with however is if you haven’t got an ‘or else’ over players then you haven’t got much, something admittedly which only seems to have dawned on players in the last decade.
The lack of an 'or else' is self-explanatory, or should be, if you're not filled to the gills with management jargon such as that being currently pedalled by Alex Ferguson. He proudly asserts his entire career was based on control, only easing his grip on players in order to more easily fling them overboard.
This is the reality of most professional organisations, those at the top self-consciously setting the tone, often far too preoccupied with making sure that tone is obeyed rather than examining if it is any good or not.
If the modern top-level GAA is characterised by anything it is the application of this stuff to the coaching and management of teams. The cult of the coach has become endemic, reaching even to the lowest junior levels after years of percolating down from the top.
The result at the top end of Gaelic football in particular appears to be a stifling atmosphere of discipline and sacrifice we are regularly informed puts professional sports to shame, and which coincidentally puts sideline merchants centre-stage. The impact of much of their supposed tactical innovation has been to turn many games into yawn-fests with the primary objective being to avoid defeat rather than seek victory.
Dangerous presumption
That punters aren’t yet voting with their feet about this says much about the power of tradition but it’s a dangerous presumption to believe the quality of entertainment on the pitch won’t eventually impact on numbers off it. What’s really amazing though is that more players haven’t long since voted.
The ‘or else’ in professional sport is simple: don’t play ball and it hits you in the pocket. The ‘or else’ if you’re an amateur is you don’t get picked, hardly the end of the world for any player, and hardly a move casually made by any GAA manager since it invites microscopic public and media examination.
It’s obvious once players decide on who they want to work with that the outcome is inevitable. This has been proved repeatedly ever since Cork’s hurlers called their county board’s bluff. So the reality of the power-play is already known, just not widely acknowledged.
You can see why the GAA administration mightn’t want to. It means acknowledging players ultimately represent themselves rather than any traditional script about community which means a lot of pious handwringing. More concretely it also means relinquishing some control.
But is it too much to hope that the greater future exertion of player power will result in players helping themselves, maybe even the rest of us too?
That instead of bleating about training rules flouted, enjoyment forfeited for faddish tactics, and talented youngsters run into the ground by control-freak coaches , they might actually do something about it; maybe even try to fix an overall picture which, we’re assured, has turned voluntary sport into an indentured penance for those playing and endurance tests for those of us watching?
Games are ultimately for and about those playing them, the same players surely ultimately possessed of the power to change things for the better.
