ON GAELIC GAMES:There are instinctive reservations when a good player from a weak county looks to move to a stronger one

FOR THE world of GAA chatter, intrigue and obviously media, the Seánie Johnston transfer saga has truly been the gift that keeps on giving. You couldn’t even be sure at this stage, had both the player and his new county manager Kieran McGeeney been granted a glimpse of the future, whether they would have deemed all of the twists and turns as being worth it in the end.

What obviously appeared a terrific idea at the beginning of the year has turned into a controversy threatening to run as long as The Mousetrap. The default plea in Kildare is two-pronged and within the GAA, universal: “other people are doing it all the time” and “it’s all Croke Park’s fault”.

The argument that players have been “imported” by counties since time immemorial is undoubtedly true but in this case irrelevant, as the issue here was whether the importation was in accordance with the rules of the GAA, specifically in relation to residency requirements.

However unedifying games-driven transfers – as opposed to those arising from a change in personal circumstances – may be they are usually managed to the extent that the migrating player takes up new employment and residence in a county. This mightn’t be any more in keeping with the ethos of the association but it conforms to the letter of the Official Guide.

That Croke Park are to blame for the delay is partly true but not in a particularly material way given that had the transfer request been wholly in keeping with the regulations in the first place, it would have had to have gone through on original application.

In a telling reflection of what a mess the adjudication process was reduced to we now have a situation where the transfer was given the go-ahead despite the fact that the body charged with determining such things has decided the player isn’t resident in Kildare – as well as coming to the more abstract conclusion that the move is contrary to the GAA’s ethos.

Could opponents defeated by Johnston’s new teams object on the basis he has been deemed not to be resident in Kildare? Technically, but in the interests of relations between the various tiers of the GAA’s disciplinary structures – not to mention sanity – such objections would probably not be entertained. On that basis the transfer has to be considered done and dusted and the player’s eligibility for the county team also secured by the most newsworthy 35 seconds of hurling likely to be staged this summer, the question arises: why all the fuss?

And fuss there has been. Within Kildare there are clearly divisions and very few of the county’s GAA community appear to be wholly comfortable about the process. More striking at the weekend was the level of hostility towards Kildare from other counties, as evidenced by – the admittedly imprecise measure of – public reaction on internet discussion boards and views communicated to public-access radio programmes.

Can it really be explained on the grounds that people were upset at the way a rural hurling club was railroaded into ticking the final box on the contentious transfer – especially as, that for all of the momentary unease, the club appeared to be willing participants in the brief charade and no one was ultimately disadvantaged?

It may be that the incandescent desire to push the whole business through and to brook no obstacles is seen as riding rough-shod over the wider sensibilities within the GAA. After all part of the reason for the abnormal length of time that it took to conclude deliberations on the matter was that there was and remains within the association grave misgivings about the motivation behind the transfer.

That motivation clearly relates to the ambition of Johnston to play intercounty football and the desire – more ardent than ever you’d imagine after the weekend – of Kildare to secure a proven scoring forward.

Many who sympathise with the player’s apparently endless travails in pursuit of this ambition – including, when speaking on Newstalk’s Weekend Sport, Val Andrews, the then Cavan manager, whose dropping of Johnston from the county panel in the first place got the ball rolling in all of this – emphasise that he’s entitled to play.

Of course that’s true but only up a point. Anyone should be able to play once they join a club. The GAA has for years been grappling with the right of players to play at club level and the right to have a proper schedule of meaningful matches. The main obstacle to that has been interference from the intercounty game, either in the form of players being withheld from their clubs by the demands of county panels and also the influence of county managers in dictating when club fixtures get played.

For all the complaints that Croke Park held up the transfer until it was too late for Johnston to play in the necessary county championship match with his club’s footballers – thus forcing him to meet the requirement in the hurling championship – the reason there weren’t further suitable football fixtures was that the whole county championship is on ice until Kildare exit the All-Ireland championship race.

The idea that a player is entitled to play at intercounty level is further evidence of the erosion of rights at the games’ fundamental level and unwittingly it recognises the creation of an elite group, whose first loyalty is to the county rather than the club.

This may be big-issue stuff that wasn’t remotely part of the thinking when the transfer was first mooted but it underpins the strong views and misgivings amongst many – including within Kildare – about the transfer and its remorseless pursuit.

There are instinctive reservations when a good player from a weak county looks to move to a stronger one.

That’s understandable because the GAA’s entire ecosystem comes under threat if it becomes practice for the best players to migrate towards the most successful counties; it’s one of the reasons why professionalism or semi-professionalism would completely change the face of the GAA.

It’s a constant concern – not because the episode has somehow illuminated a previously unknown path but because the possibility is always there even within the rules. Certainly some players wouldn’t be interested, as TG4’s recent Laochra Gael on Tipperary’s Declan Browne demonstrated, but equally others have been over the years.

It’s likely that on a list of priorities, the last match – let alone competitive match – Kildare would have chosen to mark Seánie Johnston’s debut in a white shirt would have been one against Cavan in Breffni Park.

But it will be there on Sunday week, amidst the passions of loyalty to the home-place and the energies that drive the ambitions of elite and aspiring sportsmen, that two distinct GAA worlds will collide.