TOM RYAN: Game is in a dire state
THERE was a moment last Sunday when I realised the game I know and the game RTÉ knows are two very different sports.
A depressing afternoon would deliver its ugliest punchline at the death, when we saw the distressing sight of Joe Canning being stretchered off the pitch after a sickening accidental clash with his team-mate Joe Cooney left him badly concussed.
It was a horrible moment and was all the more poignant because the great man had decorated the game with some delicious ballstriking — converting four out of four sideline cuts which is something I thought I would never see — but a game is in trouble when its only highlight is a player taking a free shot at the posts.
How much trouble? In the first half Canning also went to ground after he was hit in the back by Gearóid Hegarty’s hurl; a swipe of such little force that even a wounded fly would have difficulty proving murderous intent.
Not, though, i n RTÉ, who seemed to think that Sunday’s semi-final was a soft play extension for adults of the Toy Show.
There were calls for red cards and, due to the shock at the outrage I can’t recall who actually said it, some distressed voice
This is about mindsets, not ball weights
pointed out that you could ‘ see the i mprint of the hoop’ on Canning’s back.
All I know is listening to this nonsense, I ended up with a distressing pain in my own hoop.
There was nothing in it; the kind of incident 20 years ago that would hardly merit mention but now is just one shriek shy of a slot on Prime Time Investigates.
I can almost f orgive them, though, because hurling has become such a non-contact sport that the rare time there is some, commentators are collapsing in press boxes and pundits peddle outrage in studios.
We have a game infected by cynical, tactical fouling which is excused under the guise of ‘taking one for the team’ but if a you lay a hurl on an opponent while in a full-blooded exchange — and I am not talking about an i ntentional dirty pull which should not be tolerated — it is deemed you are a stain on the game and should be removed.
There was a time, you know, when you didn’t have to ask a stranger if he hurled; one look at this gnarled, welted hands and a couple of crooked digits either advised he spent his spare hours on a hurling field or that he was a quare awkward man with a hammer in his hand.
These days, the modern player is only a GPA endorsement away f or being a hand model f or moisturising cream.
And that’s not a dig at the contemporary player. In fact, we have never had fitter, stronger or more skilful players and yet our game has never been a worse spectacle. Go figure.
I am on the record stating that I did not believe the Championship should have proceeded — it sent out the wrong message from the GAA and I still fear that, in the weeks ahead, the price for post All-Ireland final celebrations will be paid for by our frontline medical staff — but the one favour it has done us is reveal just how impoverished a spectacle hurling has become when the crowd atmosphere generated by high scoring rates is removed.
I write this as a Limerick man, but I was utterly bored watching that game last Sunday between two of the best and most physical teams in the land.
There was nothing in i t to savour; Limerick so sloppy that they missed enough chances to win two matches, still cruised to a win in a three-point that felt closer to a 13-point one.
It was a game best/worst viewed through the eyes of two goalkeepers. Eanna Murphy hung out to dry by a gameplan where, when he could not go short, he had to go long to a powerful Limerick defence that had been further enabled by the fact that they outnumbered Galway’s forwards.
At the other end, you hoped that Nickie Quaid had remembered to put on two woollen vests lest he suffer from hypothermia, given he did not have to face a single shot all day.
Have you ever seen 14-a- side tennis? Well, you did last Sunday two teams who might as well have been behind a net so little combative action was generated, as they fired big serves at each other.
What to do? I truly don’t know. I know something like a heavier sliotar might help, but if that is the only solution then we really have not nailed down t he problem.
This is about mindsets and not ball weights.
The GAA, and I really am grasping at straws on this one, have to take ownership of this but they seem utterly oblivious.
No more than on my farm where my herd is my responsibility, the game is their herd and yet they seem to care so little for its wellbeing that they refuse to see how badly it has been neglected.
What can they do? I have never been a believer that you can solve this with playing rule changes such as regulating the number of offensive players that have to stay on their side of the pitch, but I do think that the least they can do is stop pandering to the hype, stop selling this as a warrior’s game and admit that, yes, hurling really is in dire trouble as a sport.
At the very least it needs to have that debate.
We need to get to a podium where the argument can be made that the glory of our game is when our players hop off each other in physical combat.
That would make a far better spectacle than what we have, which is the ego of coaches hopping off each other to see who has devised the cleverest gameplan.
My answer? Why don’t we send our top coaches to the RDS and let them have their battle of wits in the adult version of Scientist of the Year.
And give the rest of us our game back.