Just get on with it.
What is this culture in the GAA that just requires players to do what they’re told? No matter how much they don’t like it. No matter how senseless it is.
Train as much as you have to, squat more than you kick a football and don’t, under any circumstance, go out and have a good time in the middle of your season. Those 11-month seasons.
If you don’t like it, piss off.
Since when have the players’ opinions become irrelevant? Especially when everything to do with the team and the games and the training directly involves those same players. And, what’s worse: why are people so thrilled to look on from the outside and just demand that players go through their careers without saying anything? When it doesn’t affect them one bit.
Players should keep their mouths shut. They should do the noble thing and carry on in apathy and put up with something they frankly don’t like. They should just get on with it.
Why?
The abuse Mayo footballers and Galway hurlers have come in for in this off-season is incredible.
Why the hell would a group of men go into another campaign, into another 10 or 11 months of training five or six nights a week in a regime that they don’t agree with, and not say one thing about it? Why would they put their bodies and minds through all those hellish sacrifices if they don’t believe in what they’re doing it for?
And why, oh why, do onlookers want to force them to do that too?
No-one knows but the squad about what went on during Pat Holmes’ and Noel Connelly’s tenure in Mayo and the same goes for Anthony Cunningham’s regime in Galway. No-one knows but the 30 or 40 men that were actually there busting their balls for their counties every single night.
If the players not only wanted change, but they also felt that change was for the best, of course they should say. The alternative was what exactly? Not say? Just go on, it’ll be grand.
These are the guys who will not only be going to those training sessions and doing as they’re told, they’re also the only ones really in a position to judge and to say anything. These are the men who have a small window of their lives at the top of their sport. They get a few years to get things right. If they felt like going into 2016 with the same set-up would be a waste of another year, they’d be stupid not to say. They’d be very bloody stupid.
And why would anyone in their right minds want them to accept it?
Not only should they accept it and commit another year of their lives to it, but anyone who so much as raises an eyebrow about it should be hounded out and castigated for ‘stepping out of line’. As if they were school children.
Why would the fans want them to go along with the current until they’re drowning?
Worse still, why would the manager want to stay in charge?
Now, we’re hearing terms like Player Power. Terms that are made out to be bad, impure and the opposite of what the GAA stands for and all the rest of that guff.
It is player power, that’s exactly what it is.
Jesus, if it wasn’t player power, it would be a dictatorship. Tyranny. And that’s what some seemingly want to see happening. They don’t want players to have any kind of a say. The players should just get on with it.
Imagine you’re a manager. You’ve lost the dressing room. The players have unanimously told you that you don’t have their backing. Why would you want to carry on as manager? How could you?
And how could anyone possibly justify the notion that keeping him in charge and forcing the players to work under him is a good idea?
Tell me for what reason the players should’ve kept their mouths shut and should have just gotten on with it. Because that approach is no good for them – the ones actually doing the work. It’s definitely no good for the manager. And it’s not one bit good for the county.
All it is is another backward, supposedly-noble GAA attitude that you’re not supposed to question.
Just get on with it. Because that’s the way it is.
