IN ALL FAIRNESS - Under 21 decision should be revisited

One of the decisions that slipped under the radar a little at the recent County Board meeting was the ending of the under 21 club championships at the end of this year. There were problems of playing both under 19 and under 21 championships when players on both panels also play some grade of adult hurling or football, so it has become very hard to schedule.

Certainly, playing the under 21 grades in both hurling and football in the winter/early spring over the past decade or so hasn’t ideal but there was no other option as few clubs wanted it in the summer when many of their players are on county panels, with others tending to go abroad for the summer, while in the autumn, the focus is on senior, intermediate, junior or whatever level of adult competition a club are in.

The Covid-19 pandemic has forced the split season upon the GAA, and it has proven to be an unqualified success, particularly in terms of the quality of the adult club championships over the last two seasons where the star inter-county players are able to focus properly on their clubs and with it the level of play has improved.

We have had some sort of split season for the last two years and hopefully in 2022 we will se it come into operation in full, with the inter-county season planned to come to a halt with the All-Ireland Hurling final on July 17th and the football decider a week later. That means five entire months from August to December for club games, including June or July if a county exits the championship early.

I feel getting rid of the under 21 grade is hasty is that next year, the All-Ireland Club Finals will be played before Christmas, unlike this year where they are being brought to a halt prior to the provincial final stage with that and the All-Ireland Series being played in January. Pre-Christmas All-Ireland finals will mean, in a Tipperary context, that the adult senior, intermediate and junior county championships in hurling and football will have to be completed by mid-October. If that proves to be the case, you will have a lot of clubs whose playing seasons are over by the end of September with no games to play, leaving the last three months of the year idle, bar the clubs who are fortunate enough to represent Tipp in Munster and hopefully All-Ireland Club Championships.

It would be a crime to have all that time with few games to play in and go to and is why the under 21 championships should be given a stay of execution to see how it works properly in a fully operational split season. The under 21 hurling championship has tended to be played in the autumn/winter anyway, and maybe the football championship should be played side by side with it too. It will keep clubs a buzz for longer and as has been seen in the likes of Moyne-Templetuohy, Skeheenarinky, Loughmore/Castleiney, Drom & Inch and Ballina in recent weeks, it shortens the winter quite a bit the further you go.

Brian Fox retires

There will have been few more popular players in any Tipperary dressing room over the years than Brian Fox and his retirement from senior inter-county football this week will leave a void that will be hard to replace. It is no coincidence that the Eire Og Annacarty/Donohill clubman has been part of the Tipperary panel since 2009, in what is the most successful period for football in the county since its hay-day around a century ago.

‘Small in stature but big in heart’ perfectly describes Foxy who never saw himself as inferior to anyone and one memory that comes to mind is in the 2016 All-Ireland semi-final when a ball was breaking between him and the giant Aidan O’Shea of Mayo and it was Fox who slayed goliath, turning defence into attack where Tipperary got a score.

What a great leader he would prove to be in the dressing room to help bring along Tipperary’s most talented generation of players in a century, and every time you didn’t see his name on the team-sheet for a game, you became concerned as his cool, calm, and collected presence was hugely important for the team.

Losing the likes of Fox and Philip Austin over the past year robs Tipperary of uncalculatable leadership, particularly when they are facing into a division 4 campaign in 2022 as they aim to turn around their fortunes. Whether Fox would have stayed on for one more year if the football championship proposals were passed, which he was fervently in favour of, we can only speculate but he owes Tipperary nothing and even at times where his form for Eire Og Annacarty in hurling saw him touted for a call-up, his passion was for football and no one more deserved the success that came last year when Tipperary won the Munster title.