Donegal are 100 per cent right to be annoyed at having to play the first game on Saturday. When you sit down and think about it for a minute, it’s a ridiculous situation. Two of the teams in the quarter-finals played last Sunday. Everybody else either had a game on Saturday or a game the previous weekend. Any sense of fair play had to mean that both Donegal and Galway should be playing on Sunday.
I don’t think the GAA or the CCCC are out to get Donegal. This isn’t a matter of putting Jim McGuinness back in his box. But I will say this much – if you were going out of your way to punish a county for making too much noise, wouldn’t it look a lot like this?
Donegal would nearly rather it was a case of the authorities being out to get them because at least then they’d have a cause to rally behind. You’d imagine they will probably convince themselves of it anyway – everyone in the county will travel to Dublin ready for battle.
But the truth of it is actually way worse. It isn’t that the fixture-makers don’t make allowances for the demands put on Donegal players. It’s that they don’t make allowances for any players, anywhere. When they sat down with the four games in front of them, they weren’t thinking about Michael Murphy or Paul Conroy or David Clifford. They were thinking about numbers, plain and simple.
This should have been a no-brainer. Donegal and Galway should have been down to play on Sunday, no matter what. Seven days is the least they should have been given. But they’re not and everybody knows why they’re not – it’s because that would have meant Armagh v Kerry and Dublin v Tyrone both being on Saturday. So you’d have had a full house on Saturday and probably about 50,000 or so on Sunday.
Somewhere along the way, somebody decided that couldn’t be allowed to happen. The GAA can’t be leaving money on the table at this time of year. I’d say they got the fright of their life when Limerick got knocked out of the hurling on Saturday. One more cash cow gone to the butcher. Who cares if Donegal were going to get squeezed? It’s all about bums on seats.
That was the first consideration. If the players were even second on the list, that would be something. But of course, the second consideration was television. The way it has been all year is that the Saturday games go on GAA+, the Sunday matches go on RTÉ. No way RTÉ were going to put up with the two biggest games being on GAA+. Not a hope.
So by the time anybody got around to thinking about the players, everything had gone against them already. The money men in Croke Park got their bit, the TV companies got their bit. And what was left over for the players?
A choice between Galway and Donegal having to play on the Saturday. Galway were on the road last weekend so Donegal are the ones who got nailed. Nobody, anywhere, made any allowance for the fact that these fellas have to go to work, that they have to recover, that they have to live their lives. Six days and go again.
It’s ridiculous. Let’s call a spade a spade here. This championship has seen some of the best football in years but it’s being rushed through as if the GAA are embarrassed it’s happening at all. For those of us who are trying to enjoy it, it feels like you’re on the last tour of the day in a foreign city and the tour guide is hurrying you along so he can get away for a pint.
Everything is being prioritised except the players. We can’t have two weeks between games because it would push the All-Ireland finals out to August. We can’t have the finals in August because there are concerts lined up. We can’t push the concerts to September because ... what? It might rain on Oasis? Robbie Williams might have to wear a jumper?
In the middle of it all, players are being squeezed and squeezed and squeezed. I’ve heard people say that Donegal can’t be giving out because this is the system that’s been in place for three years now. They knew before the thing started that if you don’t top your group, you’re going to be playing three weekends in a row. And that’s all fine.
But football this year is different from football last year and the year before. Everybody can see that. There is so much more running now because you can’t stick 15 men behind the ball and slow everything down. There are so many more collisions around the middle of the pitch with the way the kick-outs are. The hooter system and the stoppages means that matches are lasting the guts of 85 minutes.
The game has changed completely but there has been no leeway built in for the players. No extra substitutions, no extra time to recover, nothing. They’re being told to just go and go and go again. Croke Park will be filled as many times as possible and we’ll go again next year and do the same again.
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That’s why this isn’t just about Donegal. They’ve got the rough end of the stick this weekend but if it wasn’t them, it would be somebody else. In Kerry, Diarmuid O’Connor pushed himself to be back for the Cavan game even though his shoulder obviously wasn’t near right. That wasn’t his fault and it wasn’t Jack O’Connor’s fault. It was the system’s fault.
There’s no breathing space in the championship, the way we have it now. No time for players to give their body a break. No time for the rest of us to take stock and enjoy the football, even though it’s as good as it’s ever been. It’s like we’ve opened a two-grand bottle of wine and we’re swigging it from the neck. That’s doing nobody any good.
Least of all the players, who are the most important people in all of this. They should be treated accordingly.
