Paraic Duffy appeared mildly annoyed that the Club Players Association opposed his proposal to re-model the All-Ireland football championship.
On their publication last August, Duffy trumpeted the proposals partly on the grounds that they would give the club championships "more room to breathe."
He proposed modifications to the current calendar, recommending the abolition of the league semi-finals, the ending of automatic replays (except after provincial and All-Ireland finals), and the switching of the All-Ireland finals to August. All measures introduced to shorten the inter-county season and combat the fixtures chaos at club level.
Therefore, Duffy was disappointed at the club body's opposition. He described the CPC's stance as "contradictory".
Duffy told RTE this afternoon.
I'm surprised they wouldn't support the motion before Congress.
I find it hard to hard to understand a proposal to have extra time rather than replays or a proposal to move the All-Ireland finals to free up time for club games wouldn't have their support.
We would like to hear what they are suggesting. All I have heard so far is that they want to bring forward the All-Ireland finals to the 1 August. I think they'll be mixed views about that.
I would have thought that they would have seen the proposals as benefiting club players. I don't see any point in them wanting to wait, we've waited long enough.
Liam Griffin, All-Ireland winning manager in 1996 and the fixtures co-ordinator of the CPA, told Balls.ie their stance is in not at all contradictory. But he does admit that it's unfortunate that the club players' movement has only properly emerged in the immediate aftermath of Duffy finalising his plans to re-model the championship structure.
It would have been preferable for all parties had the club players' movement arrived a year earlier and Duffy could have fine-tuned the GAA calendar in consultation with the new grouping.
No, I don't think it's contradictory.
To be fair to Paraic Duffy, the groundswell that led us to start this movement was been under the surface for a long time. And it is unfortunate that it collides with a time when he's put a lot of work into trying to do something with the format.
We're not saying (Duffy's plan) it's negative. But it's not the full package from our point of view and where we're coming from.
Griffin says he has no desire to kill Duffy's structure. But his principal objection for the time being is that the proposal is primarily concerned with the inter-county championship.
For a proper solution to the club/county fixtures dilemma, Griffin says that they require a blank canvass where they examine club and county fixtures in their totality.
We need to get a situation whereby we tackle all the fixtures and we look at the thing in the round and say, "how can we do this better for everybody, for inter-county, for attractiveness, for our supporters, and for our clubs?"
What we are looking for is to get together in a room with fixtures people from Croke Park and we need an overaching body that can agree a fixtures structure that could be recommended. And the way around this is to defer Paraic's (proposal) for a moment, give us a chance where we're charged with going away to come up with something and come up within a given timeframe. And we can still have all this done in time for 2018.
But if we let Paraic Duffy's proposal pass and we don't make the case for the club situation, what happens is the fixtures at inter-county level actually interfere with a possible solution within the club framework...
The problem we have is if we let the Duffy proposal go forward. Then, they are ingrained for the next couple of years. And we're sitting looking at that and we can't get change to do what we wanted to do. Maybe, he doesn't understand us fully. We're trying to get a better system for the clubs. And if we let something else happen that comes in in front of us, that means that screws us for what we're trying to get done. So, why, if we're all sincere, don't we sit down and say "let's look at the whole lot of it! Let's go goddamn fix it!"
While Griffin says Duffy's proposal is not the "full package", he nonetheless says it is not actually their desire to "kill" it outright. He even says it may be possible to work the proposal into a future framework. But the CPA is adamant it needs to be "deferred" until they themselves can get around a table and thrash out a new fixtures structure with the GAA.
This system is not evil, there is nobody bad-minded but it's evolved to the stage where it's just an Irish stew.
We have a broken system now and we need to fix it. And that's all we're saying. Please, listen, let's defer this for the moment, let's all go back to Croke Park, let's sit down with a blank canvas and come up with a plan for a way forward to fix fixtures. The totality of the fixtures...
We don't want to kill it (Duffy's structure), absolutely, we do not want to kill it. We respect it and we think he did it in an attempt to make progress, and he did it in a difficult framework in which he's working. We're aware of that. All we're saying is, "let's defer it, just hold it for a while."
Duffy noted that the CPA had argued that the All-Ireland finals should be moved to the first week of August. He said this was "all he'd heard" from the CPA. He anticipated "very mixed views" about whether a move to the first week of August is desirable.
Griffin says an early August All-Ireland final is obviously negotiable but says the reason they had pinpointed this date is because they're looking to move to a 'two-season system'. Their ideal is a system where the inter-county season and the club season are clearly segregated.
The reason for that is - without producing too much detail - is that we're looking at two seasons.
We're looking at an inter-county season and a club season. And that's what we think is the model which we think would work best of all.
Now we've done a lot of homework on this and we've looked at a lot of suggestions.
Once you start cross-pollinating them, that's when the complications start to arise everywhere. That's what we found when we tried to work a model.
So, a club championship season and a inter-county season totally divorced from one another in the calendar?
Yes, except from maybe one or two dates where you might be able to look at declaring certain nights 'a club night' as opposed to a training night.
But lookit, that's something that needs to be worked out in a meeting room and we need to look at umpteen plans. What's wrong with looking at ten plans, picking the best of the ten and saying "there's something that looks like it could work."
The CPA and others have criticised Duffy's reformed championship structure for essentially ignoring hurling. Under Duffy's round robin proposal, there will be fifteen football championship games from the quarter-finals onwards.
In stark contrast, there will still be a mere five hurling championship matches from the quarter-finals onwards. Duffy even suggested playing off the All-Ireland hurling final before the All-Ireland football semi-finals, though he appeared to row back on the suggestion this afternoon.
Griffin, a former manager of Wexford in both hurling and football, says the system as it was presented last August would clearly "diminish" and "marginalise" hurling.
There's no question about it that a 'Super 8' in football will diminish hurling. Now it's also going to diminish the weaker counties in football as well. But it'll marginalise hurling as a sport. And hurling doesn't deserve that.
It deserves to be looked at in the round as well. And I believe we can do something for hurling and football and for everybody if we apply our minds to it.
The system is totally unfair to hurling. There's no parity of esteem. And that really can't be negotiable. That's not negotiable at the end of the day.
The most important thing is for us to try and be diplomatic and go into a meeting and say these things. Because you could actually ask them to explain this.
You could ask them, "just explain where hurling features here. Do you see any negative impact on hurling as a result of this? Do you see any? And if you don't, then we have a problem."
