Weather is getting worse but the GAA continues to turn a blind eye

Inside Track with John McIntyre

THE GAA have been dicing with danger with its over-loaded spring fixtures schedule over the past few years and it comes as no surprise that an increasing number of games are falling by the wayside in January and February. Pitches just can’t cope with the traffic, especially when the weather turns foul.

Irish winters over the past decade have become wetter, but the GAA are ‘ploughing on’ by trying to cram more and more games into their calendar. Last weekend, high profile National League hurling ties at Pearse Stadium and the Limerick Gaelic Grounds were lost, while three football league matches were called off the previous weekend.

When you see well-manicured inter-county pitches struggling to be playable at this time of year, what hope have club venues up and down the country? Even training is being compromised never mind the prospect of holding challenge games. The trend of increasing wet weather at this time of year is now well established, but the GAA seems to remain aloof to the problem.

Since the introduction of the new provincial round-round system in hurling and the Super 8’s in Gaelic football, the pressure on the GAA calendar is at breaking point. Player welfare is being compromised in the rush to get the matches at colleges, intervarsity, under-age, club and inter-county level run off. There are now simply too many competitions to be staged in the length of time allotted.

What’s happening to the All-Ireland U20 football championship is disgraceful altogether. A heap of matches was postponed at provincial level over the weekend due to heavy rain and strong winds. The GAA are trying to complete the entire competition in little more than six weeks with the final due to go ahead on March 17, St Patrick’s Day.

These games were only called off as a last resort as the GAA mantra appears to be: ‘to get the matches played at all costs.’ The introduction of penalty shootouts to settle outcomes is another regrettable development, but it’s a product of the GAA not having enough dates to run off their programmes. The experience, for instance, of the Mayo and Galway U20 footballers in Castlebar last Saturday week was alarming?

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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