Mayo County Board needs to revive the club scene

Jimmy McGuinness, the Donegal GAA team manager, made few friends in the run-up to the recent Donegal v Mayo championship game played in Dr Hyde Park. Perhaps he made friends in Donegal but he had plenty of friends there to begin with. He made little of Donegal supporters by inferring that they would not travel to Croke Park because of the cost involved. I don’t think the people of Donegal are so impecunious as to be unable to travel to the capital city for a football match.

In the recent past, Mayo supporters travelled to Croke Park on numerous occasions in the hope of bringing back the All-Ireland championship and, even when unsuccessful in that ambition, rarely, if ever complained about the cost involved. 

Jimmy bored the general GAA-playing public with his whinging about the cost of hotels in Dublin. Since when do you have to book a hotel just to go to a football game in Croke Park? Only very recently!

When it comes to an All-Ireland final some supporters may consider making a weekend of it and book a hotel, but for a round-robin game, it is a case of up to Dublin and back on the same day. There are places in Donegal that are closer to Dublin than some places in Mayo. Yet Mayo people never felt the need to whinge.

Having got Croke Park ruled out as the venue, a prospect that was never a real prospect in any event, Jimmy turned his attention to Dr Hyde Park which was an obvious possible location. And then the real whinging started. There are plenty of hotels in Roscommon that can host a football team on a day out, but Jimmy could not find one. Perhaps he should have left it to the Donegal County Board to source one. They would likely have succeeded. It is the sort of work County Boards, not team managers, are expected to do. Perhaps Jimmy thinks he is the County Board. His whinging has not done anything to enhance Donegal’s GAA reputation.

Then again he may have achieved what he set out to do, which was to create the impression that everyone, especially the Central Competitions Control Committee (CCCC), are against Donegal. I’m sure that everyone and most especially GAA people have very little thought about being “against” Donegal. Such crap.

And of course, it could also be that Jimmy was not very confident about his charges. He was not convinced that they could beat a very average Mayo team. Currently, Mayo does not have a Keith Higgins, a Colm Boyle, a Lee Keegan, a Ger Cafferkey, a Cillian O’Connor, a fit Diarmuid O’Connor, a 24-year-old Aidan O’Shea, a Jason Doherty or a Kevin McLoughlin. What we have at present is a very committed, hard-working, fit bunch of players, with dedicated management, who go out every day to do their county proud.

There is a nonsense, a nice nonsense it should be said, about this “Mayo4Sam” epithet that springs up every year, generally around the first day in January. Hope, as they say, springs eternal, but Mayo football people realise that Mayo4Sam is a dream that depends on having a squad of players who have the talent, the commitment and the time away from work to prepare for an All-Ireland final challenge. Such groups of players do not materialise out of the ether. Not even Kerry can magic up winning teams every year.

We were fortunate to witness one of Mayo’s greatest teams in the James Horan/Stephen Rochford eras. We were unfortunate that we came up against one of the greatest teams of all time, the Dublin five-in-a-row team. We were the only team in the country that could put it up to the Dubs in those days and we played attractive, entertaining, exciting football. We left Croke Park defeated but were never daunted and we were, certainly I was, and I feel the majority of Mayo supporters were proud of Mayo, even in defeat. The mockery of the players as bottlers and the calumny of individual players that followed those defeats reflected acutely far more on the individuals responsible for such denigrations than it did on Mayo or the players.

We have a Centre of Excellence in the county at Bekan. It is the Connacht Council development but it must surely be available to Mayo - at a rental cost, obviously. It is fairly central for players from Dublin and Limerick and the Technical Universities along the west coast. It is a long way from Blacksod, despite what Jimmy might think, but it answers a need.

Mayo set a headline when it established a School of Excellence 20 or 30 years ago. It was dedicated to developing 40 promising underage players each year and had an excellent panel of coaches to assist with that development. Other counties followed suit and developed their own Schools of Excellence and have caught up. Mayo made the mistake of thinking that there were more than 40 (perhaps 30 might have been more realistic) underage players in the county who could go on to become elite (I don’t like the term!) players. What was an excellent concept has become blurred and tarnished.

Mayo County Board may be cautious about committing to a €20 million Centre of Excellence given the current controversial state of the finances. There is something they could do, at no great financial outlay, and that is to look at the standard of club football in the county. It is at a very low ebb at the moment. A Mayo club has not won a Connacht senior championship in ten years. Ballina Stephenites are county champions for the past two years and have not got past the first round in Connacht. They were beaten last year by the Sligo champions Coolera/Strandhill. No disrespect to Sligo but that should not happen. Coolera/Strandhill went on to win the Connacht championship. Perhaps Coolera/Strandhill might be invited to Mayo to outline how they have come to the top in Connacht.

And if the Board is to look at the standard, then they might also look at the structures. We now have a championship that is, in all reality a league. Figure that out. Because the club season is confined to one half of the year, the powers that be decreed that no serious club game can be played between January and July. Nonsense. The clubs have seen the light and have sought a re-structuring, but they have a battle ahead if they accept the diktat laid down by Croke Park and the Gaelic Players' Association that no club game be played during the inter-county All-Ireland campaigns.

There is no good reason why a competitive Mayo league of four divisions could not start in March/April and run through the summer while avoiding Mayo’s intercounty commitments. Clubs would have to accept they might have to do without an inter-county player(s) on occasion and county team managers, at all levels, Under 17, Under 20 and senior, would have to exercise good judgement rather than rely on the County Board commandments to do any juggling needed to release a county player when required.

It is not rocket science, as they say. It is about common sense, good communication, a bit of give and take, and minimal interference once a structure is agreed. Clubs would have regular competitive games, there could be a championship that is a real championship not something that apes the current seriously defective All-Ireland series. And in time a Mayo senior club could again aspire to an All-Ireland title. The clubs need to get their priorities in order. Sometimes Croke Park needs to be told to take a running jump.

Thought for the day 

Be grateful for what you have and stop complaining – it bores everybody else, does you no good and doesn’t solve any problems.