“Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?”
JOHN LYDON’S INFAMOUS declaration on the occasion of the Sex Pistols’ final gig came to mind while on the way home from a trip to the Natural History Museum last Sunday afternoon.
The radio was tuned to the closing stages of the Dublin-Donegal match, which I had refused to attend in protest at the pointlessness of the soon-to-be-scrapped league semi-finals.
Truthfully, it sounded like there had been more life among the taxidermied okapi and embalmed baboons than at Croke Park; and watching the match back later, Donegal’s defence certainly bore eerie resemblance to some stuffed marsupials.
Dublin’s Cian O’Sullivan found a radio microphone under his nose shortly after the final whistle. Rather than repeating the immortal words of a fed-up Johnny Rotten, he was in textbook league interview mode.
“Yeah, it gives us another game before the summer…another good competitive game before the business end of the season.”
Express mild satisfaction, underline importance of the championship; that’s the proven formula.
Yet 31,000 odd people pitched up to Croke Park last Sunday. By Irish sporting standards that is a decent attendance, one that the FAI would consider respectable for many international soccer matches.
Alas, the ripples of applause that greeted scores in the Kerry v Roscommon game sounded more like an outside court at Wimbledon than a big day at Croker, and if you had paid to sit through both games you may well have been thinking more like Johnny Rotten than Cian O’Sullivan by the end.
But the late, unlamented league semi-finals weren’t, in themselves, the GAA’s equivalent of The Great Rock’n'Roll Swindle; the whole league is, to a degree, a con job.
And like any good scheme, it depends on a willing mark. Step forward us, the GAA fans of Ireland.
The thousands who pour through GAA turnstiles, from icy January evenings through to the spring training manouevres of the league, illustrate the appetite that exists to watch our counties regardless of what is stake. We’re the perfect target.
And we know it. The managers keep telling us, the players keep telling us, even the way the GAA sheepishly promote the league tells us.
This is a pre-season competition, folks. Buyer beware. Save your money for the championship.
But the allure of the league’s construction – four perfectly formed divisions, regular matches against teams around the same level – catches us hook, line and sinker.
In fairness, few Donegal supporters made the trek on Sunday to watch their team’s 10 point thumping by the Dubs. Perhaps word had gotten out that the team had not trained in the week leading up to the semi-final.
In the manner of the tree falling in the forest, does a GAA match that is not trained for really exist?
With their championship opener on 15 June, Donegal joined a hefty chunk of counties for whom the end of the league represents the beginning of a two month mid-season break.
This is a little like what happens in the Russian soccer league, the only difference being that Ireland in late spring is rarely covered in an impenetrable blanket of ice and snow.
This sort of illogical scheduling is one of the things that undermines the league and grinds the gears of the players. If it is, in effect, a pre-season competition, it would at least be useful if it was in reasonable proximity to the actual season.
In his column in Monday’s Irish Independent, Martin Breheny points out that the sole reason for the football league semi-finals’ existence was “the attractive prospect of a financial add-on to a pot that’s shared among all counties.”
You could make the case that the entire league is this concept writ large: a cash generator for the GAA and county boards, as well as a useful warm-up exercise for the teams, and something for the fans to do on a Sunday afternoon that keeps them away from soccer.
You can’t blame the GAA; they’d be fools not to cash in on the public desire to watch a match, any match. But are we any different to the over-enthusiastic fans of Premier League teams in far-flung destinations, flocking to see their heroes sweat their way through a money-spinning pre-season tour?
The league might be more engaging than witnessing Wayne Rooney run off his summer holiday gut in Malaysia, but it is only marginally more meaningful.
As I write, over 32,000 tickets have already been sold for the Division 1 and 2 finals double header on Sunday week.
But while any game between Dublin and Kerry will draw in punters eager to feed their match-going habit, the post-match interviews will tell them what they refuse to hear:
“We’re not getting carried away, it’s only the league, the championship is what it’s all about.”
John Lydon decided he’d had enough of life as Johnny Rotten by the time of that final gig in San Francisco, believing Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren had left the band and its audience, literally and metaphorically, short-changed.
The football league hints at what might be possible for the inter-county game, but with the GAA unlikely to change the Championship structures any time soon, unlike old Johnny, we’ll continue to cheat ourselves each spring.
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