Wellbeing of players must be paramount

On Gaelic Games:One of the educational benefits of team sport is the way in which individual players must adapt to the team dynamic and learn the collective interest outweighs the individual.

An interesting afternoon at Dublin club St Peregrine's hurling symposium last Saturday included the views of the panel - Dickie Murphy, Tomás Mulcahy, Paudie Butler, John Allen and George O'Connor - on the best players they had seen. The consensus settled on DJ Carey.

The national hurling director, Paudie Butler, made the case strongly, saying that for 10 years Carey had led the statistics in Kilkenny for blocking and hooking as well as scoring and that the greatness of players had to be judged in the context of how they serve the team. There's not going to be a major row on the merit of that criterion but the interests of individuals should not always be subordinate.

In the last few days before Saturday's special congress it's now accepted that the proposed two-year trial of replacing the under-21 and minor intercounty championships with an under-19 grade is facing a struggle to be approved this weekend. This is a pity. The report of the Burnout Task Force is a painstakingly constructed document, taking into account a depth of expertise in the area. Members of the task force were not just concerned academics but also people with an active interest in Gaelic games, who strongly believed in the recommendation.

As frequently happens with such issues, however, the quality of a review group's work has had no appreciable effect on the quality of the consequent debate.

Instead of focusing on the damage being done to elite young players the arguments have drifted off in various irrelevant directions: "the under-21 and minor championships are very old"; "it's not that big a problem"; "the current system better feeds the senior intercounty machine" - and the ever-popular, "it's all the colleges' fault".

There's been little serious discussion of what's to be done about the problem if the task force's central recommendation is to be rejected.

At the core of the problem is the dilemma facing the whole cohort of elite youngsters: multi-eligibility. This dilemma is sometimes eased by the co-operation and sensitivity of some managers; often it is exacerbated by the stubbornness of others.

It's pot luck. For every college team that doesn't ask a player to train and every intercounty manager who doesn't disturb players involved with their college there's another who insists on players making long journeys to attend needless sessions.

The GAA's head of games, Pat Daly, said last week that this situation was part of the appeal to young footballers attracted to the AFL to try their hand at Australian Rules.

"They can operate in a more regulated environment with six to eight weeks of a close season, a proper pre-season period, and only have to cope with the demands of one team. They don't have multiple team involvements or overlapping competitions."

In whose interest are these conflicting demands? Hardly anyone, if truth be told, but none of the teams for whom a player is eligible is willing to lose him.

Players go along with it and often enthusiastically but should they be the final arbiters on what constitutes overuse, given the influence of older managers? Colm O'Rourke, one of the Burnout Task Force's most convincing proponents, made the point when talking to this newspaper after the report's publication. As the father of a player (Shane, already a Meath senior) caught up in the thick of such demands, he recognised that the underage cohort was likely to be in favour of the status quo despite the inevitability of the drop-out statistics.

"My own son would hate the idea that we'd tamper with it," he said of the status quo. If there were another six grades and he could play under-23 and under-25 as well he'd be very happy. The onus is on the association to protect players from themselves as much as anything. I think this is a way of doing so."

Despite this there may well have to be an alternative direction charted after Saturday afternoon. Here are a few pointers.

It should be directed at protecting the individual and will have to be strongly interventionist. It might seem overprotective of young players but otherwise there is significant risk that intercounty teams, particularly at senior level, will take unjustifiable precedence.

Players need to be carded in respect of their activities, recording their training and playing commitments. There is also a case to be made for nominating a priority team at different stages of the year, be that intercounty, club or college.

Other sports cater for players with a club and maybe representative commitments. But, for instance, if an under-20 club rugby player gets called up to a provincial squad, the demands of the latter team are minimal compared with what minor and under-21 intercounty players are expected to do.

Players at colleges away from home should not have to return for county training sessions at this time of the year. Driving conditions are frequently poor and their third-level teams have facilities that are close at hand. Neither should those living at home be forced to engage in insanely intense training regimes.

A representative team at minor or under-21 should be just that - a side with a cap on required attendance at training sessions.

There is a compelling argument against the minor grade and that is its overwhelming coincidence with Leaving Certificate years. On those grounds alone under-19 makes more sense.

If under-21 is to survive as a grade it needs to be all switched to the summer, as the hurling currently is, in order to get it out of the traffic jam of Sigerson, National League and All-Ireland club semi-finals.

Counties need a burnout ombudsman to monitor the demands on young players, and given the capacity of some intercounty managers to intimidate county boards, that responsibility would have to be backed up by a supervisory official at provincial-council level to arbitrate on disputes and enforce reasonable regimes.

Panels are collections of individual players. Their wellbeing, be it physical, mental or academic, should be at the centre of the GAA's games programme. No one team or group of teams should be allowed compromise an individual's future in Gaelic games by exposing him to unregulated demands in pursuit of silverware or managerial reputation.

The GAA at national level is right to treat this as a matter of the utmost importance.