GAA must not exhaust Aussie goodwill

On GAA: The dissent bubbling up from Down Under about proposed restrictions on the recruitment of young Irish footballers is the latest sign that things aren't as they should be at the GAA's only international interface.

Like something out of the novels of Thomas Hardy, where great swings of fortune (and generally not for the better) hinge on small events, the International Rules series has been pitched into turbulence largely by one moment.

Philip Jordan, the Tyrone player who was nearly decapitated by Australian captain Scott Johnson's high, lunging tackle, presumably doesn't regard his brush with serious injury as that trivial a matter, but its consequences have been a lot farther reaching than could have been anticipated back in Melbourne last October.

For those in attendance, the second Test was ugly and depressing, pock-marked by acts of casual violence. But the main sources of despondency for the travelling contingent was the poverty of Ireland's challenge and the chasm in class between the two football teams.

The scale of the outrage at home came as something of a surprise. Whether it was justified or a hysterical over-reaction is a matter of individual taste, but the knock-on effect has been to hobble the international series - whether fatally or otherwise remains to be seen.

It's not that the public outcry has forced this on the GAA and AFL, but rather that the chain of events set in motion has led inexorably to the precarious position the international project now inhabits.

To an extent, the position has always been precarious, because with only two teams involved any institutional imbalance would be fatal. As has been well documented, the Tests since the 1998 resumption have been nicely balanced at seven each and two draws, albeit that only half of those series have been actually competitive.

More importantly, there has been goodwill. Big crowds have turned out for the matches and the two organisations have been thoroughly supportive of their joint initiative. Maybe Australian engagement wasn't quite as manifest, but Irish enthusiasm compensated.

The game is faster and more exhilarating than its constituent parts. Furthermore, the series provided an international outlet for players, the opportunity to test themselves and interaction between two indigenous sports organisations, which has proved useful in the areas of games development, commerce and administration.

Not everyone within the GAA was enthusiastic, but outright opposition was definitely a minority interest and largely irrelevant. That all changed last October.

The heavy defeats and violent scenes fuelled a whole range of conservative arguments, from the suitability of amateurs playing professionals to concerns about foul play that largely lie dormant during the GAA season.

Unhappiness at the scabrous scenes in the Telstra Dome wasn't confined to Ireland, and in Australia there was genuine embarrassment at what had happened together with a telling wave of public disquiet at the behaviour of some of the country's footballers.

It was revealed that the Australian embassy in Dublin had received an unprecedented level of protests. The AFL were acutely conscious that the GAA were facing calls for the international series to be discontinued from within the association.

They were also aware that the meeting between officials of the organisations was being presented here in Ireland as a make-or-a-break summit on which the future of the series would hang.

With their negotiating partners on the back foot, the GAA drove a hard bargain - and on matters not directly linked to disciplinary problems in the game.

In the general tumult stirred up by the second Test, all forms of grievance with International Rules had been stirred up, but two of the more tangential were to have a major influence.

First, the inability of some counties to play off their club championships by the time of the international series became an issue that is apparently to be remedied by halving the frequency of the series when the organisations next meet in May in Dubai.

Pushing the series on to a two-year cycle effectively emasculates it. It will lose momentum and, ironically, at the very time that Croke Park is opening to other sports, ensure that the GAA reduce drastically their international exposure.

The issue of player recruitment from Ireland has been a sore point inflamed out of all proportion to reality. The junior series between the countries has been unfairly portrayed as little more than a shop window for AFL clubs to plunder the best of GAA talent. In fact, the flow of recruits has been close to non-existent. Colm Begley from Laois, currently in Brisbane, is - now that his colleague Brendan Quigley has returned home - the only young elite footballer on the books of an AFL club (accepting that Tadhg Kennelly is now an established star of the Rules game).

Yet because there was such hostility to the concept of the junior series within the GAA, proposals were tabled effectively to prevent any youngster from attempting the transition.

Meanwhile, the AFL were keen to maintain the underage series - not to facilitate their clubs cherry-picking Irish footballers, but to give their game additional allure in the face of competition from other sports and also avail of grants dependent on international involvement.

As proof of their disinterest in recruiting, the AFL agreed to the restrictions, which would prevent teenagers being signed - despite the consensus view in their clubs that this would close off Ireland as a viable nursery. Nonetheless, with this recruitment effectively at an end, there were still voices raised against the junior internationals at the recent Central Council meeting.

There has been no debate in Ireland as to whether spiking the opportunity for talented young footballers of such a mind to experience a professional lifestyle and maybe a lucrative career is fair or even legal.

But in Australia the rumblings are under way. AFL clubs have never been the international game's most obvious admirers, and the imminent restriction on their ability to recruit, albeit from a limited pool, won't improve that frame of mind.

The GAA needs to be careful that in the clamour for politically saleable concessions at home, the goodwill of the Australians for the international series isn't exhausted and that an exciting and worthwhile innovation doesn't peter out in the process.