It’s been the big talking point of many years and still the “split season” which New York resident and former GAA President Larry McCarthy oversaw in his time at the helm at Croke Park.
There is no doubt that splitting the season as Larry succeeded in doing has many merits - it gives clubs the opportunity to run most of their championship games while the weather is still kind and the evenings are long.
However it rankles on two fronts - traditionalists still hanker for the GAA season’s denouement to be back in September, while perhaps more pertinently, the sports marketeers point to an almost total absence of GAA national activity in this last month or the school holidays - August.
It was an apposite exercise on that score to listen to RTE radio over the past few weekends where ‘talking heads’ were wheeled in to chat about soccer and golf and bits of racing - while the absence of a sentence on the GAA front was conspicuous at what should be the time of maximum penetration on children’s minds for our national games.
The current president Jarlath Burns will be remembered for revitalising Gaelic football and hinted that before he goes he’d like to get an adjustment on how the season unfolds.
Former player and manager and newspaper columnist Colm O’Rourke wrote on Sunday in the Independent that something is not quite right. And I agree.
Yes, I love the intensity of the new hurling season but it is way too ephemeral - it is basically a three-month season with great quality but very little width.
Similarly if you want to see David Clifford or any of the top names in football again, you can hibernate until February and you will have missed nothing.
In terms of marketing, the English Premier League is blasting to the high heavens through Sky Sports how it will show 215 games this season. With the usual fanfare they have the next generation of Irish youngsters looking at Arsenal, Liverpool and the Manchester clubs as if this is the place to be.
Really, this week we should be looking forward to the All Ireland hurling final this coming Sunday, the second last Sunday in August. That would give maximum publicity instead of remembering Tipperary and Cork as something that happened earlier in the summer - July to be exact.
Similarly, we should be anticipating Kerry and Donegal for Aug. 31 - the last Sunday because in the four weeks that have elapsed since the two finals, the amount of marketing being undertaken by other codes has been non-stop and dare we say it, an own goal in terms of what we lose down the line.
So there you have it - my tuppence worth is for the GAA to tweak the great work of Larry McCarthy and give us a vital publicity blast of oxygen in this month where soccer kicks in, followed closely behind by the rugby provinces with their club campaigns.
By the beginning of August we should at most have half our counties still involved, allowing play to go ahead across the vast majority of local championships.
There is no doubt that the current system is much better than the piecemeal way the GAA system worked before the alignment and structure given by the split season.
This tweak suggested here will mean a lot for everybody without taking too much away. Let’s hope the walls in Croke Park have ears and follow our good advice.
