An improvement on some aspects, a disimprovement on others.
The GAA fixture calendar will never please everybody. There are too many competitions for one, and loads of these overlap with one another which means that individuals are being pulled in all directions.
Sometimes it’s unnecessarily so, with pre-season inter-county competitions a standout. Scrap them, we don’t need them because the majority of the players playing anyway have college commitments at the same time.
There are too many stakeholders and not enough weekends in the year, but the changes made at the GAA Special Congress on Saturday should be welcomed by club hurlers, because it looks like we will never reach a stage where nobody is complaining, and at the same time, it looks a lot better than what we have now.
What club players have gone through and still are going through now is a joke. Games are fixed for a weekend and are then postponed and postponed again because the county team wins.
Club players can’t plan for anything. Training can’t be targeted for certain dates, they are the second in line and that’s that.
At least, at bloody least, after Saturday, the club hurler has a concrete answer to when they will be playing and when they won’t.
They can plan. They won’t be slaves to their club or be made feel guilty if they plan a holiday unsure whether a game will or won’t be on and then get stung because their county lost. They know when they’ll be off, and they know when they won’t be.
The end result of the Special Congress decision to introduce a provincial round-robin series is as follows for club and county hurlers.
- February – March will be the National Hurling League only. County players only, club teams will be training.
- April will be club games exclusively.
- May – July will be inter-county Championship games. Munster and Leinster round-robin series.
- August will be All-Ireland hurling final and club fixtures for the counties that don’t make it there.
It is obviously not ideal that the majority of club players will have to peak twice in the year, both in April, and then in August and from then onwards, and you’d have to question why April is set aside as a club month only.
This could easily have been avoided.
The inter-county Championship season could have began in April, and therefore end in July instead of August, and there would be no need to shoehorn these club games in April.
Club players would be beginning their Championship in August, wouldn’t have to start training until March, and would be able to play weekly games from August on.
The system that has been agreed on is an improvement on what we had, though, and it’s better than no change at all.
Club hurlers now know that May-July will be a close season for them, so they can book holidays without worrying that a fixture will pop up.
We know it’s not ideal for club players not to be playing games in mid-summer, but for that to happen without uncertainty and limbo looks an unrealistic demand, unless there is wholesale change in County Championship lay-outs.
This is crucial for players, many of whom over the last few years were unable to do so, as a result of the loyalty that only GAA players have for their clubs.
The football version of the round-robin, the Super 8 was met with much more derision upon it’s introduction a few months ago, and deservedly so.
It was a blatant kick in the teeth for the club player.
And a CPA survey revealed why club footballers were so disgusted at it.
- 71.8% (3,577) of members said they wanted to see “an unchangeable and predictable fixtures schedule”
- “A defined holiday period” was demanded by 40.9% (2,039) of members and, on a similar topic, 38.3% (1,909) called for “a calendar year fixture list” to be implemented.
At least the hurlers have this much.
