Ciarán Murphy: Recalibration of GAA summer an improvement on times past

So much of our enjoyment of sport is built around calendar rituals. The first week of January is FA Cup third-round weekend, the first week of February is usually the start of the Six Nations, the Masters is early April. Wimbledon is the summer, and the summer is Wimbledon. In your mind you can’t separate one from the other.

There will be teams (nine of them!) knocked out of their provincial football championship before we’ve even had a chance to see Amen Corner this year, and that’s something we have to get used to. Some people are managing that psychological transition more seamlessly than others.

Jim McGuinness spoke at the launch of the Ulster championship about wanting to serve “the straw hat brigade that live all year for the county, that want to go on a hot summer’s evening, get on a bus and have a drink and watch their county play in the height of summer, brilliant football on a solid surface with a dry ball, a summer atmosphere, a balmy evening, that for me is what the championship is all about”.

This is without doubt a noble ambition – one that centres the fan experience above all else. He spoke later that same day about how likely it was that Donegal would end up playing Derry in the pouring rain in “early April” (even if the game is fixed for the 20th, there was hardly a need to over-egg it), and all of this unease feels right. It does. Shorn of any other meaning, what he says is correct.

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But the framing, with the greatest of respect to Jim, is a little off. The ‘championship experience’ he’s talking about here is the provincial championship. And that is now a sideshow.

Malachy Clerkin, the bard of Ulster, suggested in these pages earlier in the week that Derry sack off the provincial championship altogether if they want to win the All-Ireland. That Derry wouldn’t dream of doing it is testament to the residual cultural importance of the provinces, but that doesn’t make Malachy’s central point any less valid.

Say Donegal lose that game against Derry, as the form book would suggest. Jim will have either five or six weeks off to fine-tune or remodel his team, and the man in the straw hat will have three games against high-quality opposition in late May, and June.

If Donegal are good enough to finish in the top three of a four-team group, they will have at least one other knock-out game to look forward to after that.

Unless straw hat manufacturers have started using much better material than is usually the case for items sold outside GAA grounds, said hat may well have deteriorated from overuse by the end of Donegal’s season. And there will be more top-quality games between the best teams in the country this year than at any stage in the entire history of the GAA before 2023.

I’m not saying Jim’s argument is without merit. When he says that he doesn’t know the amount of people with pay cheques who can travel to the amount of games in a calendar month that a county like Donegal may end up playing, it’s a fair point. Supporters, particularly those in dual counties, will have to pick and choose. But that’s always been the reality.

The man in the straw hat (and I know this is starting to read like a David McWilliams article) had either one or two guaranteed days out in May and June for all but the last 12 months of the GAA’s existence. He has three at a minimum this year, and that’s every county in Ireland.

I should say also that this is a recalibration we’re all going through. It doesn’t do anyone any good to reflexively react every time someone bemoans something new. I’d challenge anyone to say that they haven’t heard someone making very similar points to Jim in the last few weeks, or that they won’t hear the very same in the next few weeks.

This is how change happens. The last weekend of the group stages last year, on June 18th, was breathtakingly good, but it was one day. Not everyone is going to remember Kevin Feely’s mark, Shane Walsh and John Heslin missing frees almost simultaneously to upend how an entire group finished, or Chris Óg Jones fisting a score to get Cork second place in their group ahead of Mayo on score difference. It will take time for that to infiltrate into our understanding of what a GAA summer looks like.

The championship starts with a whimper this weekend, but it was ever thus. And you can bemoan the provincial championships all you like, but think of the progress made in the last 20-odd years. We’re all desperate for structures to change now – for players and managers, every year it doesn’t is a year gone from their careers.

The watching public can surely afford to be a little more patient. Five years ago, the championship looked rather different from what it looks like now. The Tailteann Cup didn’t exist, for one, and the format of the race for Sam Maguire now is based in large part on a proposal put forth by Jim himself in these pages.

It’s a fair bet 2029′s man in the straw hat will have even more football in high summer to look forward to than he’s getting this year.