Congress, hitherto seen as that slouching democratic beast wedded to tradition and getting very little done, slipped into a frenzy of productivity at the weekend. A new president (John Horan of Dublin) was elected the night before the football quarter-finals were restructured, the CPA were laughed out of town, and the All-Ireland football and hurling finals have been brought forward to August. Heck, they even passed a motion to make it easier to pass further motions in the future: the majority required to pass a rule change has been reduced from 66% to 60%, or two-thirds to three-fifths.
While the welcoming of the Super 8s and the shunning of the CPA made the headlines, plenty of talk was triggered by the change in the scheduling of the All-Ireland finals. The refrains of the first and third Sundays in September, mentioned in virtually every RTE All-Ireland montage, ever, will become a thing of the past: a motion proposing that the "All-Ireland SF and SH finals be brought forward, to on or before the last Sunday in August".
The dates of the finals will be, er, finalised, by Central Council. It had been expected that they finals would simply be moved a month forward, which would see the hurling final being staged circa the 13th of August (the opening weekend of the Premier League) and the football final to be the final weekend of August.
Pat Spillane reacted angrily to the motion on RTE's League Sunday, calling it "stupid and ridiculous" while continuing his inexplicably prolific use of "sexy" on state television in saying that the GAA have taken their competitions out of the shop window, allowing the likes of "sexy" rugby to frolic free and unfettered in the prime time TV schedules.
I think it’s absolutely and ridiculous and stupid. Do you know why? We’re taking our main product - inter-county football - out of the shop window for five months, which gives a clear run to the other rivals sporting organisations. The rugby and soccer.
At the moment, rugby is pretty much all year around.
It’s sexy, it’s in, it’s hot. It’s what the youngsters want to play, it’s drawing huge crowds. What drives a sport is the top teams, top players. Youngsters want to emulate them as role models. I think we’re cutting off our nose to spite our face by taking the game out of the shop window for five months.
I think we need more, rather than less. But I think if you bring all the stakeholders together, from club to county board, to county managers, to provincial, to central council, I think you could have a fixture, that both could go hand in hand.
Pauric Duffy, however, has made clear that the change in tradition may not be solely restricted to bringing everything forward by a month. Instead, the finals could be played on consecutive weekends in August, and they might even reverse the traditional order and put the hurling final on after the football.
The last two Sundays are what we are thinking of – there is no reason why it can’t be done. It could be football first, hurling second. We’re open to that. We’ll look at what’s best in terms of the fixtures template.
The finals are expected to be played on August 19 and 26, 2018.
