Conor Glass: ‘The GAA didn’t handle it very well at all ... but I’ve come to accept it’

Conor Glass believes Glen and Kilmacud Crokes were let down by the GAA’s handling of the fallout from January’s All-Ireland club senior football final.

Crokes won the game, 1-11 to 1-9, but the outcome was engulfed in controversy as the Dublin champions briefly had too many players on the field during the closing seconds of the encounter.

In the days that followed a vacuum of uncertainty grew because no decisive ruling was forthcoming from Croke Park officials, so the saga rumbled onwards until Glen eventually withdrew their appeal.

“Everyone was let down by it,” says Glass. “The GAA didn’t handle it very well at all.”

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While the Derry midfielder believes there were no real winners from the affair, he remains strong in his conviction that rules were broken and remembers in the days after the match hoping a replay would be awarded.

“[Kilmacud] broke the rules,” he says. “The rules are there for a reason and if you break them and we’re entitled to a replay, so be it. If they had beat us the second day we’d have accepted that as well, but the rules are there for a reason.

“I wanted the replay. When I was on the bus on the way home I wanted the replay, 100 per cent, and the rest of the team was the same. The management was like that, the whole club was like that.

“But the more it dragged on, the more it started to fade off. Emmett Bradley was getting married three weeks later, boys had holidays planned, so the longer it went on the less emotional I was about it and I was happy enough to move on. But 10 hours, 12 hours, 24 hours after the game, albeit I was drinking, but I wanted a replay.”

However, Glass feels the manner in which the entire drama spun out ensures the result will forever be accompanied by a small-print clarifier – which would have been the case even had Glen won a replay.

“It’s tarnished now,” he says. “There’s an asterisk over it either way. If we had won it, we would have accepted it, but it would have been tarnished. There would have been an asterisk either way. There’s an asterisk over it now and there’d be an asterisk over it if we had won [the replay].

“It wasn’t ideal circumstances for both the teams. Everyone probably thinks that we were harshly done by, but the whole circumstances, Kilmacud suffered from it too, neither team was going to win from it.

“The GAA probably should have come out, whether it be 24 hours after it or whenever, and said what the result of the game was going to be and what was the way forward. The way it dragged on wasn’t ideal.

“I’ve come to accept it now and that’s why I went back to the Derry set-up, to forget about it and move on.”

Glass was playing for Derry just one week after the club final, which meant he effectively went from the 2022 intercounty season to a full club campaign and then immediately laced up for Derry’s 2023 league.

The physical and mental exertions of not taking a break were probably a contributing factor to the hamstring strain he picked up in the Division Two decider against Dublin earlier this month. He subsequently started Derry’s Ulster quarter-final win over Fermanagh, but went off the pitch after 40 minutes of that one-sided affair.

However, he will be available for Derry’s Ulster semi-final against Monaghan on Saturday in Omagh, 5pm.

“Yeah, all good. It was more precautionary than anything,” he says of leaving the pitch during the Fermanagh game. “It’s been a long year, two years, for me, so any chance I can take to get a break I’ll try to take it. Thankfully it’s all good, I’ve had a full week’s training under my belt now.”

Derry have found themselves on a different starting block this year, entering the season as reigning Ulster champions. It has brought its own challenges, switching from the hunter to the hunted.

Rory Gallagher’s side are no longer a new act on the support stage, they are instead viewed by many as potential headliners of the main arena.

“We were under the radar last year,” says Glass. “We were underdogs for pretty much every game but the Clare one. We probably used that to our advantage last year too.

“Everybody was kind of talking about the opposition team and we could just roll on with it. Last year we did a heap of work on the opposition, we knew every team inside out and that was probably why we got so far.

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“But a lot of the teams in Ireland will be watching us now and what works for us and what doesn’t work. So, I guess it’s a different sort of year and a different sort of process the way we go about games now.

“But personally, I feel like we’re in a better position this year than we were last year. I guess the next couple of weeks will tell that.”

– Conor Glass was speaking at the announcement of the 2023 FRS Recruitment GAA World Games, which will involve 105 teams from around the world playing in Derry’s Centre of Excellence at Owenbeg from July 24th-27th. The finals will be played at Celtic Park on July 28th.