'Supporting your county team is for auld fellas and school kids." This was the withering one-liner delivered to me in the aftermath of my rain-sodden misadventures in Roscommon, told in these pages a couple of weeks ago, for Galway's first game in the Connacht championship this year.
The man who told me this watches more GAA than is strictly good for one’s health, and has played or been involved at every level of the association, be that club, county, or colleges, so I didn’t immediately dismiss this pretty aloof-sounding generalisation (then again, he’s from Cork, where aloofness is practically an art-form). So who actually does support their county team, other than auld fellas and school kids? Well auld ladies, for a start.
But there is also a cohort expressly left out of that equation – the playing-age population of the GAA, the people in their 20s and 30s that should know and appreciate the hard work required to play at the top level, should have a deeper understanding of the game as it’s being played now, and should in fact personally know the players that make up the county team better than almost anyone else.
To a percentage of the playing population, the county team is something that gets in the way of them getting to play
It seems wrong-headed, but many club players just have no interest in going to intercounty games, a symptom of how bad the fixtures situation has been over the last 20 years. The only certainty players could provide wives and partners was that if one’s county team are playing on a given weekend, that is one weekend the club team most certainly would not be.
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Things are changing, but there is still a cohort of club players who want their county team beaten so they could get a start made on their own club championship. That may sound selfish, but that’s the reality. Essentially, to a percentage of the playing population, the county team is something that gets in the way of them getting to play.
We still don’t know exactly how it is going to work, but one hopes that rather un-civic feeling will be among the first casualties of the split season.
For everyone else, perhaps the county team should be taken as part of a balanced GAA diet – mixing the high-carb experience of Thurles or Croke Park with the fibre-rich goodness of an intermediate club hurling game, as well as the sugar-rush of high-quality under-16 stuff (and that’s not to mention the thin gruel of under-8 training in the rain in October).
Jack McCaffrey expressed bewilderment to me earlier this year at the idea of Dublin fans who supported the county team but were not affiliated to a club in any way, shape or form. Your county team might be an elite sporting entity, but it’s not the same as supporting Munster, or Liverpool, or anyone else.
“Jumping aboard the bandwagon” is seen as the antithesis of loyal support, but supporting your county team is the very definition of bandwagon-jumping. When they’re terrible, you can stay away guilt-free and focus on the club. When they’re good, you put the bunting up, happily jump in the car, and you’re welcomed with open arms. We understand that, that’s how you separate the good years from the lean ones.
Even the ticketing situation reflects that reality. All-Ireland final tickets are distributed through the clubs, who reward the people who take teams, who sit on committees, who run the show at home. It’s seen as a reward for those people, and previous attendance at earlier rounds is not seen as a prerequisite to getting a ticket – in fact, that’s barely a consideration at all.
That annoys those people for whom involvement in the GAA is solely based around supporting their county team, but that’s the system. The only way around that is to buy a GAA season ticket, which requires you to be at 70 per cent of your county’s league and championship games, which then gives you the chance to buy an All-Ireland final ticket, and that, to be honest, is a commitment most of us are happy to avoid.
Now, to brass tacks – this is not an elaborate "sub-tweet" (ie, talking about someone without mentioning their name) of Mayo people, in the week of the Connacht final. It's just that this topic is never far from my mind when Galway play Mayo.
The Mayo support really is amazing, and I shudder to think what the last decade of Dublin dominance would have looked like without the colour and the drama provided by Mayo throughout all those back-door summers, even leaving aside the challenge they posed to the never-ending champions when they finally met.
We in Galway admire it, we’re just not going to be made feel bad about our rather more laissez-faire attitude across the border, that’s all. We of course have our hurling team, the races, our thriving arts scene to divert us – it’s just difficult for us to commit ourselves 100 per cent to it.
But in weeks like this, with a Connacht final in Croke Park to look forward to, it’s easy to find the time – even for your correspondent, snugly positioned exactly half-way between school-going age and “auld fella” status.
