LIMERICK STAR GEAROID Hegarty believes the split season has been a positive move for the GAA.
The earlier finish to the inter-county season and the rushed nature of the All-Ireland championships drew criticism in some quarters. Some pundits questioned the GAA giving up valuable time to promote the game in August and September.
But from a players’ perspective, Hegarty supports the new model.
“I’m personally a big fan of it,” he said after being named as the PWC GAA/GPA Hurler of the Month for July.
“I think the demands on players nowadays are getting harder and harder. Shortening the season a small bit, okay it is putting pressure on you from game to game; if you get a little niggle you might miss two or three games, but that’s just life.
“Every single inter-county team this year would have trained over 100 times, some of them 150 times, depending on when they went back and how far they went in the championship.
“If you think about training 150 times for maybe six league games and five or six championship games, there’s no other sport in the world that does that I can tell you. Look at the Premier League, NBA NFL – it’s all games week-on-week.
“I know it’s tough but in my opinion, as a player a game what you want is games. You don’t want a game followed by a five-week block of training before your next game. That’s much harder to me than it would be to to have a game, recover for a couple of days and have a game the following week or even two weeks later.
“Players want games, spectators want games. I think it’s great, I think the split season is brilliant. I know it was shortened, I’m not saying it’s perfect. I don’t think there is a perfect solution. Maybe it can be improved on slightly I haven’t really thought about it, but this year was a success, definitely.”
He feels the crowds attending club games in the fine weather over the past few weeks speaks for itself.
“Look at the wet weather that the club championships have been played in over the last number of years…I know, down in Limerick, there’s been record attendances at club games down in Limerick over the last number of weeks..
“There were thousands at a Premier Intermediate game a couple of weeks ago in Clarina between Kildimo and Mungret who are local rivals,” he says.
“Spectators are getting to go to club games again in August in beautiful weather. Club players are getting to play proper championship games on good surfaces. There’s been a bit of focus on the negatives around it. Yes, the season is condensed but there are so many positives associated with the split season as well.”
Hegarty admitted it took some adjusting to go from the highs of playing an All-Ireland final in Croke Park to returning to club duty with St Patrick’s, who operate in Limerick junior ranks.
“I’d be lying if I said it if was anything other than extremely tough. At inter-county level which is obviously extremely high, it’s pretty much professional without being in the name.
“With the Gaelic Grounds perfectly cut in every time you come in to training with bags of balls, brand new sliotars there waiting for you to puck around with and to train with.
“We played our first game in basically a thunderstorm against Killeady there a couple of weeks ago on a Saturday. We went back training on the Tuesday night down the field and the grass was about six inches long and all the sliotars were soaked from the game on Saturday night, they weren’t dried out.
“I just said, ‘Wow, what a trip back down to earth from the highs that we’ve had over the last number of weeks.’ But look, that’s a club scene, it’s like a different sport but it’s great to be involved also at the same time.”
St Patrick’s junior champions in 2017 before being relegated from intermediate a couple of years ago. He’s optimistic that the work being done in the club of late will reap dividends in the future.
“It’s on such a smaller scale but it means so much as well because they’re the lads that you would have grown up hurling with,” he says. “And now obviously my brother is on the team as well with the club. We need to hopefully get back up intermediate because there’s so much work going on in my club at underage level and it’ll be a number of years before we see the fruition of that.
“It would be nice to get back up intermediate for the crop of players that is coming through. I was down there recently giving out medals at underage training recently for U-8s, U-10s, and U-12s and, honest to God, there must have been 30 or 40 of them at every age-group.
“That mightn’t be big numbers for some, but we’re a really small club in inner-city Limerick so to have 30 at any age-group is a massive achievement for us. There’s a huge amount of work going in at underage in our club. It’ll take time, but we’re on the right path for sure.”
