Time to honour men of the early years

A few years ago a wise colleague, the late soccer writer Peter Ball, remarked laconically that awards schemes were great fun provided you didn't take them seriously. There is much to commend that approach when considering yesterday's announcement of the football Team of the Millennium.

That, however, would be to overlook the greater significance of the project. On the surface, the scheme is a way for the GAA to mark the millennium and An Post's involvement with the issuing of commemorative stamps gives the whole enterprise a national and public acknowledgement. A hurling equivalent will follow next year.

More profoundly, the respective teams will form the basis of a GAA Hall of Fame. This idea has as one of its more obvious influences the vast sporting culture of the US where all major games have long enshrined their heroes in this manner. Yet this is slightly different.

Unlike many sports around the world, both hurling and football have a very definite epicentre. Croke Park is the headquarters of the GAA both in a sporting and administrative context. It is where the biggest events of the year are staged and it is where followers of football and hurling gather in largest numbers.

Accordingly it is appropriate that the planned display of the Hall of Fame will be spread throughout the stadium when it is completed. Ordinary followers will mingle in the midst of the commemorative tributes to each of those chosen.

Sport greatly lends itself to such celebration of history. No cultural pursuit sets such store by the accurate recall of dates and data. Dr Mike Cronin, author of the recently published Sport and Nationalism in Ireland, made the point that with his background mainly in Irish political history, he has been taken aback at the facility with which sports devotees can point out factual error off the top of their heads.

Sports history in his opinion leaves an author more open to being brought to account than would be the experience of a military historian. That such widespread absorption of - and in - history characterises sports followers means that the GAA's recent initiatives are long overdue.

Last year the GAA Museum opened and in the meantime has enjoyed great success with attendance figures far outstripping what had been anticipated. The Hall of Fame is a natural progression in that it personalises - more than any museum can - the history of the association, in the words of president Joe McDonagh "its games and its central characters".

It is this element of what was announced yesterday that will live longest. Perhaps the GAA has over-estimated the team's potential for controversy which will surely only flare briefly. Every year the All Stars teams generates a fair bit of discussion for the very reason that the data is shared between all followers of the games.

Anyone with a television can have an informed view on who should be on such a team. That such a tightly-defined awards scheme can provoke heated debate doesn't mean that the greater scope of the millennium team should provoke even more intense discussion.

In effect it is on too grand a scale and consequently almost amorphous in the minds of followers. None of this devalues the idea. For all that there may be raised eyebrows over some of the inclusions or exclusions, no one could argue the right of all 15 to be inducted into a Hall of Fame.

The limitations of the scheme as practised were only the same as those governing human longevity. In an attempt to enlist as great a degree of experience as possible, the organisers invited a number of distinguished journalists, mostly retired, to make the selection.

Naturally their span of experience covers a particular era or number of eras. Too late in the century and players' reputations haven't yet been polished up by posterity. Too early and there is no first-hand experience of their exploits.

By my reckoning, anyone watching football for the 20 years between 1945 and '65 would have had the opportunity to watch 12 of the 15 players on yesterday's team. Their merit as Hall of Famers is undeniable but they hardly constitute a representative sample of football as played since 1884.

MICHEAL O Muircheartaigh (himself a selector) referred in his presentation address yesterday to the near-impossibility of selecting the side. As he pointed out the game went from being 21-a-side until 1891 to 17-a-side until 1912 to 15-a-side ever since.

How can anyone make reasoned judgments on that basis: the competing merits of Aeroplane O'Shea (whose soubriquet accurately dates him to those years when such things were a wonder rather than things which land late and leave you hanging around airports), who dominated centrefield in the infancy of the 15-a-side game and, say, Brian Mullins.

Then there are personalities who had a seminal impact on the game. Dick Fitzgerald, after whom the stadium in Killarney is named, was a prodigious footballer back in the days when Kerry and Kildare were embarked on the "games which made the GAA" at the turn of the century.

In 1914 he wrote the game's first coaching manual and, like many in the Kerry GAA, had his attention diverted by the independence movement.

Any cursory scan of GAA history would elevate him into automatic inclusion in a first 15 Hall of Fame inductions but hardly anyone alive saw him play so how could he be considered for something which was largely based on first-hand experience of football virtuosity?

Paddy Downey, the distinguished previous GAA correspondent of this paper (interesting fact: the first two GAA correspondents of The Irish Times, PD Mehigan and Paddy, actually span the entire history of the GAA to date), made the point yesterday that perhaps more reliance could have been placed on the work and opinions of our predecessors in the coverage of Gaelic games.

This is a shortcoming which will have to be addressed, preferably sooner than when the Hall of Fame grows in small, annual increments. Given that only one selected actually played intercounty football during the first 50 years of the GAA, some mechanism will have to be devised to back-load significant football personalities from the turn of the century and beyond.

Although the aim of keeping future inductions exclusive and restricted is commendable, some additional means of drafting in those whose playing careers pre-date both moving pictures and human memory should be considered immediately.

A long and fascinating history like that of the GAA demands a comprehensiveness in its coverage and presentation. Recognition for those who pioneered the sports we all now take for granted shouldn't be delayed for very long.

smoran@irish.times.ie