League is second best to the clubs

In these Celtic Tigerish times not enough credit is given to the seasonal industry which media pundits have developed in criticising the annual All Star selections. Praiseworthy indeed are the efforts of those hacks (part-time and full-time alike) who can crochet minor reservations about a notional hurling or football team into passionate pieces of advocacy journalism. This country needs more of their resourcefulness.

For too long the business of this end-of-year award shindig has been mired in a tangled undergrowth of red tape which only a one-eyed Eurocrat could admire. The All Star critics are right. Who sets the limits of an All Star team at 15 selections? Why not 20, 21? Why not one for everybody in the audience?

There is a suggestion (again it has the smell of pernicious Brussels bureaucrats about it), that those who write pieces which insist that buddies, idols or mere journalistic contacts should have been included in the All Star team, should then also name those awardees who should therefore be deprived of their baubles.

In practice, this would work as follows: suppose, on the evening of the awards, a courageously drunk journalist sidles up to, say, Vinny Claffey, grabs him earnestly by the arm and says: "Vinnie it is a scandal of Lewinsky proportions that you haven't been included in this All Star team. I am aghast." Well, that journalist should be required to confront Karl O'Dwyer and tell him that if he had any decency he would give his award to Claffey and go home.

The same rule would apply in print. Anybody who elevates Seamus Moynihan to the ranks of the martyrs should explain why John Finn is unworthy and untouchable.

All this is by way of aside, however, some necessary stuffing at the top of the column to make sure that the words stretch all the way to the bottom of the column. (Sadly, Europe has not seen to it that all opinions come in 1,200-word nuggets.) What most intrigued us about the annual squall provoked by the All Star selectors was the suggestion by Tommy Lyons that a certain number of All Star places be reserved for the league title winners. What are they feeding Tommy on these days?

It is laudable, of course, that Tommy (whose team, coincidentally, are the umbraged league champions) should wish to uphold the stained honour of the league competition. One suspects, however, that he believes none of it.

Tommy's suggestion came, intriguingly, in the same week that his selector, Paul O'Kelly, put the league competition in its proper place by announcing that if Offaly win the competition again this year it will be "the greatest accident since the Titanic". In the Offaly dressing-room, when he shuts the door, Tommy says much the same.

Quite right, too. Nobody properly regards the league as the second most important competition in the GAA's calendar anymore. Tommy Lyons, who cut his teeth with Kilmacud Crokes, knows well that the club championships have supplanted the National Leagues in prestige and practical importance.

This winter, for instance, the National Football League is unfolding in its customary fashion. Top players resting up for the winter. The GAA using the competition as a testing ground for experiments with the rules. No more than four or five thousand people bothering to turn up to watch All-Ireland champions Galway play.

Several top teams are biding their time, going through the motions, gauging their efforts precisely in order to avoid the inconvenience of either relegation or the play-offs. Others, with no hope of championship success, are going flat out, stringing together small necklaces of victories which will either save the job of the manager or replenish the coffers of the county board.

THE second competition in the GAA calendar is the club championship, whose growth and wellbeing this decade have been nurtured by the very roots of the game. The club is not just, as officials are fond of reminding us, the most sacrosanct unit of the association; clubs are what generate the most passion, the most gossip, the best rows and the keenest rivalries.

The club structure and its iron-clad links to place and parish are what has preserved the GAA in these times of Murdoch-generated soccer mania. Despite the relentless pumping of English and international soccer into the living rooms of the country, great tracts of the population are in thrall to the romantic soap opera that is club competition.

Nothing at club level is counterfeit or bogus. After a long, long year, Corofin went out of the Connacht championship a couple of weeks ago. Last weekend they won their seventh county minor title in a row, beating the big city boys from Salthill. Eleven of the team are eligible for minor next year. They didn't mourn for long in Corofin.

Yesterday, we were in Limerick, trapped in the snarled traffic as the throw-in time approached. Twelve thousand people, at least, had made their way out on a December Sunday to watch the representatives of two small Munster parishes do battle. The ground was heavy and the pitch was unevenly mown, but the boys from Toomevara and Doora-Barefield set about the business as if their lives depended on it.

The club championship is for home. It's the day out with the people you grew up with, the people you have known the longest and best. On Friday night, Jamesie O'Connor, Ollie Baker and Seanie McMahon were in their tuxedos in the Burlington Hotel, sipping with the media and the boys of the star-spangled summer. They know their place in life, though, they know the path that brought them there and they hit the sheets early. By lunchtime on Saturday they were sloshing about in the mud of a field in Clarecastle with the boys they grew up with.

Yesterday, a wonder year ended for them. They looked tired, washed out and happy as they whooped into their dressing-room. DooraBarefield, who had years so bad that once, 30 years ago, they conceded a walkover in the first round of the Clare championship, won the Munster title, the fourth Clare side in succession to annex that piece of silver.

It wasn't a great game of hurling, but one of those GAA occasions that leaves you smiling. This was square root and grassroot stuff, the secret of the GAA's success. The annual All Star circus is mere distraction and froth compared with it. Jamesie, Ollie and Seanie knew that. So does Tommy Lyons.