This is not sport.
Sport is meant to be competitive.
Sport is taking on an opponent who is meant to be at least on the same level as you, an opponent who can at least give a good attempt at matching your skills and temperament against them.
Sport is not annihilation.
Sport is not paying in to see a team fail to score for an hour and be beaten by 71 points.
This is not what parents brought their children to training for, made them lunches, and sacrificed good money to pay for boots and gloves. All that was not to see them trudge into a dressing room after a savage hammering.
But it is what happened to the Kilkenny minor football team this afternoon.
A record score in Leinster perhaps from the Wexford-Kilkenny game? That's not even sport is it? https://t.co/SzS16c3iL2
— SportsJOE (@SportsJOEdotie) April 16, 2016
No one individual is responsible for a scoreline like this.
Today is a day when a group of young men have been failed by everyone they trusted to guide them, to help them, and to protect them from experiencing a day like today.
I wonder how Kilkenny minor football preparations compare to those of the Wicklow minor hurlers? #GAA https://t.co/S40P8Wu9sp
— Mikey Stafford (@me_stafford) April 16, 2016
Kilkenny were never going to beat Wexford this afternoon.
The Kilkenny Twitter account saw the writing on the wall as early as the seventh minute and did not tweet for the rest of the game.
This game was played because a group of young men wanted to represent their county. They did not deserve to be put through what took place today.
Often results like this get quickly forgotten in Kilkenny football.
This could be another that gets swept under the carpet as the county board and the Leinster Council get on with running the championship as they see fit and the result will become a mere footnote.
But if the GAA thinks this is an acceptable outcome or if anyone thinks this is funny, then they are sorely mistaken.
If you laugh at that result you know nothing about pulling on a club or county jersey, nothing about personal pride, nothing about being a young man trying to do your best and being let down by the systems that are supposed to support you.
If you want to know anything, ask the 15 Kilkenny teenagers how they feel today on their drive home after the lowest day of their sporting lives. They should not be ashamed, it is those outside the dressing room walls who should feel embarrassed.
