Victims of GAA's slap-dash justice

The real victims, as usual, are forgotten about. If it happened to farmers there'd be EU grants and whinging in the Dail, yet when the most cherished and noble of the nation's professionals - sports journalists - face an unprecedented mileage wipe-out nobody cares.

An exclusively Leinster All-Ireland hurling final and Kildare winning through to the football final. There is no god. What's more, there'll be no Christmas for us this year. Hope yis are all happy.

Clare didn't look happy on Saturday afternoon. (Look, if I'm not getting decent mileage I'm not going to bother linking the paragraphs.) Of all the sights this busy GAA weekend, the sight of them exiting Semple Stadium in single file was the most affecting.

When we look back on the hurling summer of 1998 some of the elements which went into creating the impression of a storm front of major controversy will look pretty small. And Clare will look more sinned against than sinning.

They were undone at the semi-final stage by the sporting equivalent of two acts of god. Stephen Byrne's remarkable saves and Jimmy Cooney's remarkable mistake. A hard way to leave the championship.

For sure they sinned. Ger Loughnane will find the tapes of his unplugged sessions a little embarrassing. He said many things which he shouldn't have said, but it was only in the manner in which he trampled some of the innate friendliness and comradeliness of hurling that the sins became more than venial.

He lashed the Munster Council with scattergun words and will probably still have to stand trial for that. Punishment has already been visited on him though in the form of the distraction those words caused his own team. He is a passionate man and the qualities which elevate Clare to their uniquely intense levels of performance are the qualities which blow him off course.

As the summer matured Loughnane and many Clare people began to exhibit signs of acute paranoia. Paranoia didn't help their cause, but neither did it mean that some people weren't out to get them. There was clear antagonism with some elements of the media and there were the usual raft of inconsistencies in the disciplinary business.

Colin Lynch deserved some punishment for his misuse of the timber but while you could put out an all-star team of this season's miscreants who have gone unpunished, he is unique in having had to miss three major championship games as a result of his foolishness. Colin Lynch didn't receive the same treatment as Waterford and Offaly players received.

There would be no satisfaction for anybody at this stage in seeing Michael Duignan and Johnny Pilkington deprived of their places in the All-Ireland final as a result of their own misdemeanours in the void game with Clare. Given that they were allowed to play influential parts on Saturday in Thurles, such a move by the GAC would only further discredit the association's slap-dash justice system.

As for Loughnane, having been persuaded back to the dressing-room last winter, he has seemed for a while like a man preparing to detach himself from the hurling world for a while.

His importance in reviving not just Clare hurling but the game in general cannot be underestimated. Those who took a mischievous pleasure in Clare's departure from the championship on Saturday have forgotten what a dull monochrome world hurling had become before 1995. Indeed when Clare lost the league final of that year to Kilkenny great was the wailing and the gnashing of teeth at the thought that Clare were never going to break through. Hurling needed them to do precisely that.

If Loughnane decides to hang up the megaphone, however, his sabbatical will be just a small part of the difficulties Clare now face. All the controversy which has broken over their heads this summer has perhaps obscured the most salient fact of Clare hurling, which is the total honesty of the effort they put in.

When Dublin lost the 1991 championship series to Meath their captain, Tom Carr, made a speech in which he referred to the rare beauty of championship play as being the unreserved commitment of both teams, the great games when players show themselves totally, holding nothing back and leave themselves exposed to the most devastating disappointment when beaten.

As Clare filed out of their dressing-room on Saturday afternoon they looked as wiped out as any team we have seen. They gave more and gave it more honestly than any other team in memory. That was their beauty and that is their greatest problem for the future. With or without Loughnane, relocating that molten intensity and avoiding the temptation to cut corners mentally will be hard.

They have played 16 championship games in four seasons, which is a lot of effort for a team which needs a long runway to get motivated. More than that they have grown older, they aren't the bunch of fresh-faced bachelors they were in 1995. They have wives, girlfriends and worries, all the adult distractions.

There is a fatal sense of perspective which leads to that trap door with the graffiti that says: "It's only a game lads, sure it's only a game".

It has been a hurling summer of mind-numbing proportions. The great games have been rare, but the stories have been vivid. Clare bogged down in controversies half of their own making. Offaly and Kilkenny, the eventual finalists, coming back from the sort of disruptions (Babs and DJ) which might have been terminal.

Ironies too. Offaly, the most vigorous objectors to the back-door system, have reached an All-Ireland final having lost two games in the one summer (and having won another, against Wexford, which they deserved to lose).

There will be those, possibly within Offaly (and the other back-door beneficiaries, Tipp) who will see the past two championships as concrete evidence of the inadequacies of this structure. Yet when teams win great games, like Offaly did on Saturday afternoon, the moral right to progress further seems indisputable.

And the net result of the new structure has been more games and better games. This column was amongst those which cherished the traditional all-or-nothing nature of the old championship, but when we look at the sheer amount of hurling there has been on television this summer and the quality of the All-Ireland semi-finals for the last two summers, the experiment appears to have worked.

Hurling is the quintessential summer game and if we can pack more games into the championship, be it through back doors or round-robin systems, the game will benefit. And the additional mileage will undo some of the harm done this weekend.