Croke Park can pick up soccer tricks

The World Cup teaches us much. We learn that personality conflicts can be as insane and apt to occur at the zenith of professional sport as they are in small-town or even county training grounds. It's just that the incredulous audience is global rather than parochial.

We aren't to know how baffled Roy Keane was by the reference to the Donnellan brothers in Galway during Tommy Gorman's questioning on RTÉ last week. But presumably it triggered a worldwide rush for clarification as the international news agencies picked through the entrails of our equivalent of the Princess of Wales interview.

(That comparison has already been made: the expulsion of Roy from Saipan as Ireland's own Death of Princess Diana. " 'E were the People's Midfield Enforcer, 'e were, the Keane of Hearts . . . etc.")

Aside from fanciful amusement at the prospect of the ultra-cautious John O'Mahony finding himself the focus of world media attention in the week before a big championship match, there are other more thought-provoking issues raised by the rare collision between the World Cup and the GAA championship season.

The World Cup is a great international event, truly global in the interest it provokes and coming closer than any other sporting event to emphasising the worldwide community we inhabit. Unlike the Olympics, it has only one discipline, one expression, and all around the continents that expression is understood.

On a simple level, the GAA just can't compete against something of such a scale. From 1966, when expanding television coverage brought the World Cup into the Irish mass consciousness for the first time, media and marketing attention have made it inescapable.

Within the GAA, time has tempered reactions, and the rawness that characterised attitudes to soccer even 12 years ago during the Italia '90 adventure has calmed.

There are for sure those within the association who are culturally affronted by soccer and enraged by some of the things it is perceived to stand for: partitionism, professionalism, mercenaries, memories of colonial oppression and so on - depending on the virulence of your views - back to the Famine.

GAA people who fell foul of the odious ban on foreign games were treated like the unfortunates who went north from rugby union - shunned and abandoned. Con Martin, who went on to play for Ireland over 30 times, had won a Leinster title with Dublin in 1942 while a teenager. It was over 30 years before he was eventually awarded his medal.

The cracked zealotry of vigilance committees that sent doctrinaire Gaels - suitably fortified against the decadence of it all - around soccer and rugby grounds in order to spy on their fellow GAA members can even at this remove make reasonable people shudder.

In general there has been a slow but steady retreat from such extremes and, for those who want to think about it, soccer shines a light into those areas that the GAA is trying to address.

There may be no simple answer, but how come entire areas of Dublin are bedecked in tricolours and patrolled by cars also flying flags when no such displays of affiliation are to be detected when Dublin are playing a big championship match.

It's not just the international dimension, as rural areas work themselves into similar states of excitement leading up to big championship fixtures.

The disparagement of soccer that has taken place in the past within the GAA is ironic given the modern ideals of the association. Last January's Strategic Review Committee (SRC) report emphasised the role of community in the association's activities. It also acknowledged the vast scale of the problems facing Gaelic games in Dublin - even if the proposed remedy caused more fuss than the diagnosis.

Yet all around Dublin in the past week, people have been finding in the World Cup a sense of community and a sense of belonging that the GAA is unable to evoke on such a scale in the city.

Peter Quinn, the SRC chairman, did say at the press launch of the report that urban catchments were often too large to merit being called communities, but that's the way it is in cities.

Other counties may find it possible to sustain inter-county panels consisting of players who individually are known to large numbers of the county population, but in Dublin - particularly south Dublin - that's never going to happen because of the size of the county.

It emphasises the challenge facing Croke Park if large urban areas are to be successfully worked. Primarily this is a developmental task, and an enormous one at that. Sending in development coaches on the sort of scale necessary to tackle the problem will be a major logistical and financial investment.

Even in the year after Dublin's last All-Ireland win, 1995-96, Dublin's then head of development, Laois hurler Cyril Duggan, was taken aback at how few children around the county's schools could even name Dublin footballers, apart from Jason Sherlock.

There are problems inherent in Dublin's social conditions. The preponderance of one-parent families in areas of resolute deprivation has eroded the ability of entire communities to establish the voluntary networks necessary to sustain Gaelic games, which unlike soccer cannot be played in a courtyard with a couple of bins.

Poverty makes what are simple things in other areas heartbreakingly difficult: organising cars to bring kids to matches, just organising full stop. To nurture Gaelic games requires that children play them; there is no armchair audience cultivated by satellite television.

Which raises another point, frequently mentioned here over the years, but particularly relevant at a time when the whole country can see the impact of a hugely promoted, mass-broadcast competition: the GAA has to look more closely at its own promotional blueprint.

Whereas changes over the past few years have undoubtedly improved the All-Ireland championships, there is great scope for further progress. Changes to the hurling championship and the introduction of the qualifier system have increased the number of attractive matches and extended public interest in the championships beyond one match.

But to match the relentless bombardment of soccer matches, the GAA has to devise league-based systems that will maintain public interest over a period of weeks during the summer and provide all counties with a definite programme of matches. Anything

less is increasingly a terrible waste of resources.

Competing with a great, international game like soccer may seem impossible at times like the present, but with the fortunes of the national team so influential in the success of soccer, the game responds to criteria over which it has little control.

The GAA, on the other hand, has that control, but it should now be acting urgently to exploit its advantage to the maximum.