One of the enduringly fascinating things about the GAA is its capacity to confound your most confident expectations and do exactly the opposite of what you smugly and confidently predicted it would. To say the football development committee's proposals for root and branch reform of the league and championship structures came as a surprise is an understatement akin to suggesting blithely that the tackle in gaelic football might need to be looked at.
It is the sporting equivalent of your oldest maiden aunt - the one who without fail gets you a matching handkerchief and socks for Christmas every year - turning up on your doorstep on Christmas Eve with tickets for an all-expenses paid trip to New York with a Knicks NBA game at Madison Square Garden thrown in.
Given the quantum leap in thinking that the reform proposals entail, perhaps the most surprising thing is that the inner-sanctums of the GAA were able to keep their own counsel for so long. Ever since Joe McDonagh set up the development committee, the prevailing notion has been that it would be yet another in a long line of GAA talking shops and that ultimately nothing would come from it.
What a stroke of Machiavellian genius. The end result has been that while the committee pondered and deliberated, the pundits and commentators took their eye off the ball, became even further besotted with the reconstituted hurling championship and all but disregarded the long-term health of its sister code. Considering the fundamental nature of what has now been posited, it is remarkable that there was hardly an inkling of what was going on.
That information black-out persisted even as the GAA came under renewed pressure with the recent formation of the Gaelic Players' Association. The prime movers in that movement had targeted insurance issues as their first major priority, but lurking below the surface there was also a barely concealed agenda which had as its ultimate goal championship reform. And all the while this was precisely what the GAA itself was addressing. As an exercise in pulling the rug from out under the players' feet this takes some beating and it remains to be seen whether the GPA will now be forced to change tack and address much more directly the sticky issues of endorsements and remuneration.
But then given the calibre of the men on the development committee it is hardly surprising that they were more than able to keep everything under wraps. In Art McRory, Pat O'Neill, Pat Daly and Noel Walsh, the committee drew together some of the deepest and most impressive thinkers in the modern game. But none is overly disposed to the modern culture of the easily digestible sound-bite and their natural inclination would be to tread carefully rather than stumble into controversy with all guns blazing.
This approach has served their aims well as rather than a drip-drip of snippets of ill-informed gossip over a protracted period, these new proposals have arrived fully formed straight out of the wide blue yonder. Their impact has been much more dramatic as a result of that and a debate about some of the fundamentals that might not otherwise have been aired has been forced to the top of the GAA agenda. That has only to be a good thing.
The Way in which that debate has unfolded in the days since the plans reached the public domain has been extremely revealing. The players who have suffered at the coal-face of the old, established system have gushed with enthusiasm. And lined up on the other side are the county board apparatchniks for whom the very notion of change is all the excuse they need to reach for the garlic and the crucifix.
The attractions for the players are obvious.
The reforms offer the prospect of guaranteed matches at a time of the year more likely to produce something approaching palatable fare. One game will follow fairly quickly on the heels of another and it will be possible to establish some semblance of both form and momentum without nonsensical three and four week-breaks. All of which, of course, means very little to the foot-soldiers of officialdom. And much of their opposition will be fuelled by that great GAA unmentionable - money.
With the provincial championships reduced to three games in both Ulster and Leinster and just two in Connacht and Munster, the revenue available to the respective provincial councils could be reduced by up to two-thirds. And with the emphasis in the projected figures placed much more on the counties, they would seem to be the obvious beneficiaries. Given that scenario it is hardly likely that the provincial councils will meekly agree to the financial version of turkeys voting for Christmas.
While there is potentially immense gain in all of this, there is also clearly going to be a considerable degree of pain. The raison d'etre of the new system is that there should be a division of what up until now has been a homogenous championship with the so-called "weaker" counties stepping down a level to something that is to all intents and purposes a B competition. With seven Ulster counties pencilled in for the new northern section, that leaves two places in the secondary competition. The consensus seems to be that Antrim would fill one while the second would be a toss-up between Fermanagh and Monaghan.
There have already been dark grumblings of discontent from the Antrims and Fermanaghs of the Ulster GAA world and if the process is to be inclusive and genuine, those voices of dissent will have to be listened to.
But any criticisms of the new order will have to be set alongside the gross imperfections of what it purports to replace. Gaelic football is stale. It is stagnating and unless something is done that stagnation could quickly mutate into decline.
Given the way that the wagons have already been circled, it seems certain that Gaelic football's brave new world faces a traumatic journey from gestation to fruition. Fur and feathers seem certain to fly in the months to come, but history may judge us harshly if we don't jump together in a communal leap of faith.
