Flexibility the key to All Star selections

Maybe it's the time of the year at which they have always been announced but the All Stars have always filled a void for controversy, discussion and where needed denunciation. Last week's presentations threw up the statistical milestone of the 1000th award and although that may seem a contrived basis on which to review the scheme, it will do as well as any, writes Seán Moran.

This week saw the publication of a book, by two well-known Irish Independent journalists Martin Breheny and Colm Keys, which looks back at the All Stars for the 33 years since it was established as arguably the most high-profile sports awards in Ireland. It's a nostalgic trip through a landscape of great players and at times bitter disputes. Although the idea originated in the early 1960s, it wasn't until the advent of sponsorship that the scheme took off as a gala occasion and the prize of an All Star became a nagging ambition for most players.

Flashing back through more than four decades, you get a sense of the evolution of the All Stars into the perennial presence they now are in the GAA calendar. There have been major developments along the way from the change of sponsors to the brief interlude when players made the selection to the present. The advent of the qualifiers has had an interesting impact on the scheme over the past couple of years. With top players getting more opportunities to play - and be seen playing - over the summer a greater consensus is becoming apparent at the end of each season.

Consensus doesn't always correspond with sound judgment but there do seem to be fewer outpourings of genuine outrage at the selections.

Last Friday's hurling team sparked one serious debate, which concerned the naming of Ken McGrath at centrefield. The Waterford player had an outstanding year at centre back but so did four other half backs. This was always going to be a conundrum for the selectors and one which echoed old arguments. In the past there was a school of thought that passionately opposed the notion that players be switched around in a team. The line went if you had two outstanding left corner backs, you made a choice - hard as that was - rather than slipping one of them into the other corner where competition mightn't have been so hot.

But in the modern game positions are far more flexible. Teams get shuffled around during matches and there is a greater inter-changeability. Not to recognise that would be daft. The boundaries of this flexibility remain those of credibility. That's a subjective consideration but few would say McGrath lacks credibility as a midfielder and I'm not one of them. Put it this way, which lacks more credibility: McGrath at centrefield or the 2004 All Stars without him?

This became one of the great generational issues. Older journalists were more likely to hold to the fixed-position view; younger ones tended to be more flexible.

It all reached a calamitous denouement 10 years ago when Brian Whelahan, hurler of the year, was left off the All Stars team. As someone who was present I remember only too well how it happened. A vast majority of the selectors wanted both Dave Clarke and Whelahan to be on the team. As they had each played at right wing back, it was proposed no other player should be put forward for either right or left wing back. That way, whoever came second in the right wing back poll would automatically get the other position. That would have worked nicely had it been left alone and the overwhelming will of the room would have been respected. Instead an unhelpful suggestion was made to throw in a few candidates who had played left wing back.

The idea resonated with those who were opposed to flexibility in the process and a couple more names were added. So the potential for disaster had entered the system. But it still required some spoiled votes (selectors were meant to vote down the line on the four candidates, four points for a first preference, three points for a second, etc) to complete the process.

All voting was done by secret ballot so those present didn't know Dave Clarke had out-polled Whelahan for the right-wing slot. The traditionalists gave Whelahan no preferences in the vote for left wing back (had he even got the lowest preference, one point, on all such ballots the All Star would have been his). Those who had contrived the situation managed to rubber-stamp the crazy outcome because they had a majority on the smaller steering committee and so emerged the greatest miscarriage of justice in the scheme's history. There would be no opportunity to atone for this at the next scheduled meeting as the sponsors, Bank of Ireland, withdrew to concentrate on their new sponsorship project, the All-Ireland football championship.

The whole fiasco gave added impetus to the many who slag off the journalists' role in the All Stars - a tradition that survives to this day. To those who subscribe to this view, the answer is simple: set up your own awards. Journalists invented the All Stars. It's their scheme. Obviously it was always a partnership with Croke Park and latterly it has been the GAA's clout that commanded sponsor interest but it was the late Mick Dunne, one of the scheme's founders, who involved Carrolls as the first sponsors.

Croke Park exploited the Whelahan fall-out to turn the All Stars into a players' scheme but the relationship between the GAA and the new sponsors ended unhappily after two years. During that period the players too showed themselves fallible (most obviously in the omission of Jason Sherlock in 1995) and by 1997 the journalists were back on board.

It would also be a good idea if the Gaelic Players' Association selected their own teams of the year. After all in the English Premiership there are awards adjudicated by both the soccer writers and the PFA. There's room for both perspectives.

The Chosen Ones by Martin Breheny and Colm Keys is published by Blackwater, and costs € 15.

• Last week I referred to Newstalk 106 being an honourable exception to the lack of interest generally shown by Dublin local radio. It has been pointed out this is unfair to special interest station Anna Livia FM. I had intended the reference to apply to commercial stations. ...