Time to revise unworkable close-season training ban

CLOSE SEASON:OF ALL the grey areas that cover the ways of the GAA, the close-season is the greyest of all. Officially, next weekend represents the last chance for teams and managers to get together in a collective environment before the November and December shutdown commences.

The congress decision to persevere with the close season originated in the sound belief that the increasing demands on elite players leads to burn-out. But the close season hasn’t worked properly. Some counties have adhered to it. Others have found ways of getting around it.

Threats of fines to county boards whose teams flaunt the rules have never materialised. But then, policing the rule – short of planting whistleblowers at various county grounds – is next to impossible.

Teams can meet at different locations, at different hours and if they want to, they could form a hang-gliding club and meet for the purposes of training for that endeavour.

For the likes of Dublin and Kilkenny the hiatus comes as a welcome relief, with the club championships in full swing and All-Ireland duties taking precedence. The sheer physical toll of playing through a full championship season means the players on those teams need to ease up. But for counties chasing success, the story is different.

New Limerick hurling manager John Allen has voiced his unhappiness with the situation last week, as he selected a preliminary panel and prepared individual training programmes for his players to follow. His dissatisfaction is easy to understand. The winter break means he has to spend two months twiddling his thumbs before he can even begin to put a cohesive training framework in place, not to mention begin building a rapport with his team.

By then, it is January and the demands of a new league season will loom. For all managers starting out, the situation is the same. The league competition is not the limbering-up exercise it used to be; summer momentum is increasingly attained through league success. Donegal were the surprise packet in last year’s All-Ireland football championship but their early preparation was severely hindered by the league.

“It is definitely easier going into year two,” says Donegal selector Rory Gallagher. “We are a bit lucky because we had an extended run and with club football being put back, the lads do need down time. But the flip side is that while we used 20 or so players steadily, we would like to have a look at the next 10 or 12 in training sessions now. It would be great to be doing that now to give them a better understanding of where we are going.

“You need to bring in 30 to get a game going and it will be of a weaker standard. Last year, it was just extremely difficult to get a handle on things. We went through fitness programmes but because you are not allowed play football, the earliest opportunity that we had was in January and we were straight into the McKenna Cup.

“Unfortunately we had players in Galway and Dublin so we had a haphazard cup competition – I think that we had just one win over Jordanstown. As well as that, when we resumed collective training, we felt that we picked up a lot of injuries. So by our first league game, we were eight points down with 15 minutes to go against Sligo and we were short players. It wasn’t ideal.”

Donegal managed to salvage a draw in that match and then embarked on a run that brought them promotion and an Ulster championship. But Sligo’s season went into a bit of a tailspin; demotion and a loss to Leitrim in the Connacht championship. In Division One, Tomás Ó Flatharta’s first season in charge of Galway was placed under scrutiny because of poor league results.

The pressure to deliver begins with the league, which is why managers are reluctant to let the months of November and December slide. But the training ban was born from good intentions. Eugene Young, the director of coaching and games with the Ulster council, was on the committee that studied the effects of burn-out on players in 2007.

He points out that while most people envisage “burn-out” as a kind of physical exhaustion, the study carried out by Lynnette Hughes of the University of Ulster found that the exhaustion was often more psychological.

“Just the repetition of being out training every night and then competing at the weekend wears players down,” says Young. “Players need a rest from that. You can’t instruct someone to simply stop training. The ideal is to freshen up the mind through other methods of training – cross training or gym work. But there are a number of issues.

“For one thing, it is not that clear as to who is supposed to be enforcing the rule on collective training. And then, a lot of county players are in college and training hard through those months so they are not in that catch-net. So they are probably in better condition come January than the county players who have been resting up.

“Most county teams want to raise the bar in terms of fitness each year so there is the fear that you slip back by resting up. So there are a lot of considerations. You do hear of teams not adhering to it but it is all anecdotal. There are no statistics to clarify that 10 or 15 teams have been training through November and December. It’s all word of mouth.”

But from the beginning, the concept has been undermined by mutual suspicion. The Cavan footballers came close to landing themselves in hot water when they were reported to have met for a session in Breffni Park after an Ulster club championship game. But the GAA looked into the matter and found that there had been no breach of regulations.

Last year, former Mayo manager John O’Mahony summed up the general mood when he asserted that the GAA had “no conviction” when it came to enforcing the ban. He said it was common knowledge that several counties were training regularly, splitting their panel into two to technically stay within the regulations.

Those stories made managers who played it by the rulebook feel foolish and as if they were losing the race before the gun had even sounded. The practice of guerrilla training sessions leaves players in the worst position of all. They feel morally obliged to attend, particularly those who are keen to make an impression. But because these training sessions aren’t officially taking place, they cannot claim for travel or food expenses. It all comes out of their own pocket.

From their perspective, the idea has completely backfired: not only are they not getting the prescribed rest, they are not even receiving their basic entitlements from their respective county boards. It is becoming unworkable.

“Teams should be allowed to run their affairs as they see fit,” says Rory Gallagher “There is no doubt players who have been involved in long hard seasons need some down time. But every manager knows that and will give that. But there are individual exceptions within every panel of 30. For example, in Donegal, Leo McLoone missed most of the season. Christy Toye is only coming back. Those guys would be mad for some collective training now.

“To my mind, the winter training team ban was forced in to cut down the expenditure of running a team. We can understand that too. But county teams who are out of the championship in June or July would often have their club championship finished up by August. So those guys have had too much rest. If managers could decide which of their players needed a rest, it would work out fine.

“Doesn’t the International Rules eat into the training ban? And college players are really encouraged to play where managers would prefer them to rest. So there has been no real consistency.”

It all points to a staggered system, where teams that exit the championship early are permitted to resume collective training earlier. But with commitments to club and college teams, measuring the quality of rest that players are allowed is all but impossible. And planning social lives – holidays or family occasions – remains a frustrating proposition for all players. No matter how it is broken up, there are never sufficient months in the year to accommodate the GAA calendar.

“I think sooner or later they are going to have to look at finishing the All-Ireland finals in August,” says Gallagher. “That would give more time for the clubs to play their championship games in reasonable weather through September and you could maybe have the provincial championships out of the way by December.”

Breaking with the September tradition would represent a radical departure. But as the GAA county teams prepare to turn the lights out for a few months, it is clear that something has to give.