In November last year, Ben Woodburn scored in a cup game game and wrote his name into the history books as the youngest ever goalscorer for Liverpool Football Club.
At 17 years of age – and 45 days – the Welsh international, who has also already had some massive nights for his country, goes down as the youngest footballer to score for one of the biggest clubs in the world.
If Ben Woodburn was in Ireland, he wouldn’t be allowed to play for his county in an amateur team.
He could play under-20s but, even if he had the potential to break records and light up national and international stages, he would be ineligible to play senior.
Despite regrading the minor competition from under-18 to under-17 and despite already causing this year’s batch of under-18s to miss out on a whole year of minor football and hurling, the GAA failed to address those players who’d therefore be deemed too old for minor but still too young for senior.
It means there’s an entire year group there caught in an inter-county void where they’ve graduated from underage but they’re still not allowed to push on.
If David Clifford was born a few months earlier, for example, he’d be in a holding pattern – purgatory – waiting around for a full season for the go-ahead to play seniors. He wouldn’t have minors to compete in, he’d just get a couple of months out of under-20s football and then have to sit out for the summer.
It happened to Callum Brown, the really promising young Derry player who was picked to start full forward for his county in the McKenna Cup only to learn that he was ineligible. He plays soccer for Linfield and, suddenly, a year that he would’ve been dying to pour everything he had into the Derry cause and his own personal climb through the county ranks is now put on ice and it’s not like he doesn’t have other suitors.
So not only is it unfair and tough on the young players born in 2000, there’s also a more general risk that you could lose some of these players to other sports as they wait for the green light to enter the big time. It probably won’t happen in Brown’s case but he’s not the only case.
So many players affected by this https://t.co/aUGKMLrY0m
— SportsJOE (@SportsJOEdotie) January 5, 2018
There are 17-year-olds all around the country going to be celebrating birthdays in the coming months and, whilst they’re allowed to go earn money playing professional senior sport, whilst they’re allowed to play for the country’s senior teams in other sports and whilst they’re even allowed to turn out for their clubs and have lumps taken out of them by men 20 years older, they’re not allowed to play senior football with their counties.
And the only reason is because nobody bothered their arses to think about that gap when they were regrading the under-18 tournament.
Too old for minor. Too young for senior.
