#TheToughest Issue: Is it time to reschedule the inter-county Championship and focus on clubs?

"Neglect the clubs and we lose touch with the heart and soul of the GAA."

So went Páraic Duffy's address as he launched his annual report this week. The GAA Director General believes it is time to shrink the size of the inter-county championship calendar and, by doing so, shift the focus of the organisation back on to the clubs. "All of us, and especially our county officers, need to act now to rebalance our priorities in a way that our attentions are devoted more to our clubs and less to our inter-county activities," Duffy said. Is he right? Would club players be better served if we rescheduled the inter-county championship?

Conán Doherty says: NO.

It must be annoying alright: to be from Kerry. Or Dublin. Or Donegal. The other 29 counties? Not so much. The problem isn't with the inter-county championship, it is with how those counties are scheduling their own competitions around it. Rather, how they're not scheduling them. I get it, it's frustrating when your matches are being called off left, right and centre and you're told to be ready for a certain date - just in case. And then you have to constantly be ready, and be ready again before you're eventually told way down the line that your game is this Sunday. Don't blame the inter-county championship. Blame your own county's games administrator for refusing to do anything until their inter-county involvement is ended. Or for refusing to even plan ahead. What's the big surprise? Championship takes place between May and September every year. Every single year. There's no curveball there. Your county will take part in said championship every year. The maximum amount of ties any team will have is eight. If club games are coming to a standstill because of a format that has been the exact same for the last 15 years, that's not Croke Park's fault. It's the respective counties. Blame the inter-county manager who won't let his bubble-wrapped players leave the living room until his own self-interest is served. Blame the club who won't play without their county stars even though relegation playoffs were designed for that very purpose - that no-one goes straight down, they have another chance if it's needed where they can play their big-hitters. And blame whoever it is who accepts the club's requests to cancel their fixture. They're the ones who are doing an injustice to the "heart and soul" of the GAA. They're the ones who are neglecting the club player. At a time when the inter-county game has never been bigger or more elite, at a time when they're actually fighting to buy the rights to show it on TV and the organisation is going global, tampering with it for the sake of two or three counties is honestly uncalled for. Tampering with it because we can't work around five, six, seven or eight inter-county games a year seems drastic.

Conor Heneghan says: YES.

Another year, another mass debate on the structure of the championships and another year where precious little, if anything at all, is likely to be done to fix the most glaring problem in the GAA. The most annoying thing about the debate surrounding the GAA calendar every year is that there are plenty of sensible solutions put forward by people who know what they’re talking about. Jim McGuinness, for example, suggested a very workable solution last summer that will probably never see the light of day. McGuinness’ solution, in fact, was very similar in structure to a suggestion put forward by former president of the GAA Sean Kelly a few years’ earlier. One of the most forward-thinking presidents in the association’s history and the brightest manager of his generation came to a consensus view on what needs to be done and yet we’re left with the GAA’s proposal of a bastardised version of the much-loathed Tommy Murphy Cup that will go before Congress in Carlow next month. It’s a sticking plaster solution when stitches are needed to heal a wound that has been gaping in the Association for ages and is starting to look uglier by the year. Páraic Duffy was dead right when he said that the GAA needed to rebalance its priorities and put the focus back on clubs. The neglect of the club game hasn’t been the elephant in the room so much as it’s been a herd of elephants in a claustrophobic elevator and the clubs have long since had their trunks packed and are ready to leave the circus. Kelly and McGuinness knew it, Duffy knows it and the thousands of club players around the country know it too; inter-county will always be king but club players have been shafted for ages now and the time has come to shout ‘Stop’. I don’t want to go down the self-pity route here. I’ve played club football in Mayo for over a decade now and even though Mayo have been at the business end of the Championship on a regular basis in that time, the structure in the county is, for the most part, fairly sound. Clubs in Mayo are, like a lot of counties, at the mercy of the county team, but you won’t find club Championships postponed for an entire summer, county finals taking place on St. Stephen’s Day or a county player playing six club games in 22 days almost immediately after winning an All-Ireland. Horror stories like that exist in almost every county in the country and yet the pattern repeats itself every year, with lip-service being paid to the issue at the start of the season before it’s buried all over again when the action starts. Really, how hard can it be to assign windows with fixed dates for all the various GAA competitions, including club, so everybody gets a fair crack of the whip? And if that means stepping on a few toes along the way, so be it. In its effort to please everybody, the GAA is actually pleasing nobody and the reaction to the latest proposals suggest that it will remain that way for the foreseeable future too. Come the summer, when Dublin have dished out another 25-point beating against one of their Leinster rivals, the issue of inter-county Championship structures will raise its head again and the plight of the club player won’t be as much of an issue, when it should be the biggest issue of all. The clubs remain the lifeblood of the GAA and it’s good to see Páraic Duffy still realises that. Everyone else in the association needs to realise it too. Brought to you by AIB GAA, proudly backing Club & County. Follow AIB GAA on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.