This weekend sees the top eight sides in Gaelic football contest the All-Ireland quarter finals at Croke Park, a concentration of the best in a national game that by many accounts is deeply banjaxed.
But then again, Gaelic football always seems to be banjaxed. It’s the game’s default status, it’s very own dire home page. If football wasn’t chronically banjaxed there would be something wrong with it.
It was the same even during times nostalgia now dictates to be golden eras.
The Dublin-Kerry rivalry of the 1970′s gets referenced in dewy-eyed terms but at the time the rampant and revolutionary hand-passing central to it prompted hand-wringing about the horrors of ‘glorified basketball.’
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Grim prophecies of declining audience interest have pretty much accompanied every era since and probably for evermore. Live long enough and you get to recognise them repeating on the way back around.
So, once again we go into the serious stages of the championship with widespread fears about a lack of competitiveness, to which even the most casual of observers can legitimately ask, what’s new?
No matter the levels of exasperation surrounding it, there is nothing else with the same grip on the popular imagination or no more potent expression of sporting identity
Ditto the whole bit about the system favouring the big boys. Check too to the actual football being crap and, naturally, the Sunday Game still manages to be both prissily anodyne and disgracefully partisan.
Throw in cynicism, sideline Generalissimos costing individual expression with their tactical shaping, bloodsucking county boards screwing the clubs, as well as Joe Brolly waxing bucolic, and Gaelic football is pretty much up to speed as per normal.
True there is a touch of novelty to resentment about those travelling lengthy distances from the country having to fork out for expensive fuel and accommodation.
But, really, what’s that but a contemporary twist on age old rural resentment of Dubs having home-court advantage: although God help any city slicker discriminating anyone by not allowing them their day out in Croker no matter what the mileage.
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If local pride is the GAA engine it is fuelled by a weird mix of indignation and resignation when it comes to football.
However, examining the prospect of this weekend’s quarters, just how gloomy a state can Gaelic football really be in because from at least this impartial perspective some of the despondency feels more than a little rote.
Okay, Cork-Dublin will be a rout and while romantics will hope Clare can wipe Derry’s dour eye it’s unlikely to be much of a spectacle. But Kerry-Mayo rarely disappoints, and it contains the princely David Clifford, while Galway-Armagh is a rare pairing with the potential to be a free-flowing cracker.
Best of all though a case can be made for six of the eight teams still in the competition ultimately winning the All-Ireland. Some of those cases might be a stretch but the same could have been said about Tyrone a year ago.
It was some mythological golden era when such a spread of contenders could have been legitimately argued in the past.
It underlines growing support for the case about obsessive defensive football, that was a prerequisite for so long, finally being in the rear-view mirror. Possession remains the key word. But it is possession with an increasingly positive purpose.
Best of all the GAA appears to have somehow stumbled on to a structure for the whole thing that comes close to making sense.
Everyone knows the ‘P’ word at the root of most of Gaelic football’s problems isn’t possession but provincial. The local may be all-important but only the GAA could make a straightforward knock-out competition involving 32 counties such a convoluted exercise in labyrinthine politics.
However, the old chestnut about throwing the championship into an open draw has never been some silver bullet to the competitive discrepancies between the provinces. Minnows get gobbled up no matter where the monsters live.
So, the remunerative provincial championships remain and in recent decades trying to square that wonky circle has prompted plenty scheduling gymnastics.
More twists and turns will be tried in 2023 when a new tiered structure comes in with, deep breath, eight provincial finalists competing for Sam Maguire in a round robin of four groups of four teams also including the next eight sides ranked in order of league seniority.
The group winners go straight to the All-Ireland quarter finals with the second and third teams vying for the remaining four places in a process that to outside eyes at least sounds comes across as fiddling for its own sake.
What’s wrong with leaving well enough alone: because by Gaelic football’s doleful standards there’s plenty enough that’s well enough so it can produce an intriguing set of quarter finals as part of a structure that looks to fix much more than it damages.
If devotion to the local is to be more than lip-service, then the calendar had to be altered to improve the club scene in every county. Ordinary club players were quite rightly voting with their feet when it came to club championships being run off in hock-deep muck.
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The impact on the county scene might be a comparatively crammed schedule. But it looks as efficient a distribution of playing opportunities as can be reasonably expected in the circumstances.
The point has been made that having the championship done and dusted in July is too dramatic a shift, deserting the traditional All-Ireland dates in August and September when the GAA had most of the sporting horizon to itself.
Apparently, the promotional threat from other sports makes it a mistake to give up such a shop-window.
But really, what threat is there to Gaelic football’s status? No matter the levels of exasperation surrounding it, there is nothing else with the same grip on the popular imagination or no more potent expression of sporting identity.
Sure, it might be banjaxed most of the time and constantly demanding Irish solutions to very Irish problems. But it feels like time to dial down some of the catastrophising. Because if it is banjaxed it’s the kind of banjax that’s sure to endure.
