Split Season doesn't solve all ills

IN ALL FAIRNESS

There is a famous comment from a Chinese premier in the 1970s - probably misinterpreted - with regard to the French Revolution. When asked about its impact he told his American audience that it was too early to say. If we are to assume he was referring to events almost 200 years earlier, it does rather push assessment of the GAA’s split season into the ha’penny place. Nonetheless it might be no harm to bounce around some ideas even if it is still relatively early in the lifespan of the new arrangements.

In an opinion piece in the Irish Times recently, Denis Walsh said that the split season has consistently been portrayed as a triumph for clubs and club players. In reality, he continued, nobody has gained more than inter-county managers. It is an interesting view because one of the push factors for the split season was the absolute overwhelming grip inter-county team managers began to exert on the GAA calendar from at least the mid-1990s. The split season, even if it was stumbled upon accidentally as a response to the upheaval of five years ago, was regarded as a potential remedy to a situation that could hardly be reversed at inter-county level.

In the interests of fairness, it has to be said that the situation which obtained in the old days where you might be waiting a month or six weeks for a game, depending on the outcome of others, was no fun for players. Endless drills, however productive, are not the most fun way to spend summer nights. There is cause to envy the current players who are playing matches regularly and often.

That said there is much that is not ideal. It does seem unfortunate that the North Senior championship has been essentially reduced to a blitz competition. Time was when North semi-finals might be a double header on a Sunday afternoon in Nenagh. Even allowing for Tipp’s success, having these key fixtures at separate venues on a Wednesday evening before the weekend of the final is certainly not an ideal consequence of the new system.

Consider too the lesser heard voices in the North division. Back in the 1990s North Junior ‘A’ hurling titles were won by Ballinahinch, Knockshegowna, and Ballina. All three clubs had to navigate choppy waters populated by Senior clubs including Toomevara and Nenagh. The nature of the championship of the time, which ran alongside the Senior championship, was that by the time the North semi-final or final was reached clubs were generally shorn of their Senior players. Under the current dispensation you have to wonder if we are ever likely to see a genuine Junior team winning the divisional title. This is a competition which had four or five rounds over and done with before the Senior competition began. It is most certainly an in-built unfairness in the system.

The split season was also founded upon a basic untruth. Part of the year would be devoted to county hurling, the rest to the club. In reality clubs are still going for months on end. Obviously, this is not to imply that this is a bad thing for players. In any GAA club there is an intangible and immeasurable but very real benefit in meeting up and hurling. The Kilruane MacDonaghs’ jersey sums it up very well ‘club amháin, pobal amháin – one club, one community’. In most of rural Ireland the GAA club is the community, or at least its most vibrant aspect. Still, a lot of the split season sales-pitch revolved around player burnout and its reduction under the new system. A club such as Borris-Ileigh is now in a scenario where the whole season and potential success could come down to four games played in a three-and-a-half-week period.

Then there is the other aspect where we go from July 20th to the early months of next year without an inter-county hurling match (or at least a men’s one). Does this matter? Presumably strong proponents of the split season can only have one answer, which is that it doesn't. And maybe it doesn't. Time will tell. But the question is worth posing. Not every county will winter with the same glow of satisfaction as the one overseen by Liam Cahill. Time will drag elsewhere. Will inter-county teams lose their position in young hearts if they are not visible?

Curiously enough the idea of early All-Ireland Finals is perhaps not as new and fresh as it might seem. Back in 1966 the venerable hurling writer Pádraig Puirséal pondered the question ‘why not play the hurling final in August?’ He was responding to a different environment when there were no All-Ireland semi-finals in hurling between 1959 and 1969, which essentially left the month of August free.

In that year Kilkenny played the All-Ireland Final and two legs of a League Final against New York in September alone, before three games of the new National League and the Oireachtas Cup before Christmas. ey even managed to squeeze in the County Final in October. No wonder an All-Ireland in August seemed attractive. Bennettsbridge beat Mooncoin in that 1966 final to win the tenth of their dozen County Senior titles. Their first was in 1890, and Johnny McGovern was on all the other eleven teams between 1952-71 – some record that.