A complete and utter waste of time

BEFORE talking about the opening round of the O’Byrne Cup, let me say this: the O’Byrne Cup is a complete waste of time.

It would be better to have more league games than to waste the month of January playing a competition no one gives a damn about. Better still, give these four or five weeks back to the club championships later in the year, then the GAA might be doing something productive about solving the fixtures crisis that blights nearly every county. Why waste so many weeks of the year pussy-footing around with a competition that serves very little purpose? Time is too precious in the current calendar for the GAA to persist with these competitions.

The money raised through these games is for a good cause, the injured players fund, but you’d make more money with a couple of extra league games or one more game in the championship.

If it’s purely a fundraising exercise then there are better ways. As for the teams, what purpose did Sunday’s game serve for Kildare? It was like men against boys watching them play DIT.

If the training ban was observed during the last months of 2012 then county teams across the country are only back training seven days. Of course the dog on the street knows that that’s not true but let’s stick with the theory for a minute.

On 1 January, having last played in the summer, Kildare resumed training for the season and seven days later they’re expected to play their first competitive match. No athlete would run a race after a week’s training, let alone after a break that lasted a few months.

This is the world inter-county teams live in so that’s why everybody has to turn a blind eye to the fact that every team is training during the ‘training ban’. It would actually be irresponsible of managers not to insist that their players trained during the ‘training ban’.

And why is it that some of the teams in the O’Byrne Cup can train beforehand and others can’t? What right-minded manager, or player, would go out unprepared against a side that is in the middle of their season?

The continuing presence of third level colleges in the provincial pre-season tournaments is baffling. They have no place in the competition unless the GAA decides that county under-21 teams should be allowed to enter the Sigerson Cup. Why not let county minor teams play in Fresher leagues? Why not let Laois clubs play in the Kildare championship?

It doesn’t happen in any other grade or for any other competition. The O’Byrne Cup is now a fine-tuning exercise for the third-level teams before their championship. They are the only ones who really benefit from it, even if it was hard to see what good it did DIT on Sunday. It’s about time those colleges were told to take a running jump. They have their own league and championship and that should be enough for them.

And since when did third-level football become so important to the GAA that they get to have first call on players? I’m reminded of that old advertising slogan: Ask not what your county can do for you but what you can do for your county. Should it now read: Ask not what your college can do for you but what you can do for your college? Plenty is being done for the colleges at the moment, in fact more than is being done for clubs.

Clubs have to make do without county players for most of their league games, even their access to them before championship is limited. The O’Byrne Cup protocol is the equivalent of Kildare’s clubs getting first call on their county men for the Aldridge Cup. It’s ridiculous and it’s time that it stopped.

The futility of having the likes of DIT in the O’Byrne Cup was evident long before half-time on Sunday against Kildare. Watching some of the collisions, as Kildare’s bulkier men crashed into some light students, it was plain to see that there was the potential for some serious injuries. Never mind the heavy pitches and the bad weather, there were some players on the college team that were no bigger than minors, and small minors at that.

It was surprising to see so many familiar faces in the Kildare line-up, I expected to see a more experimental outfit take to the field although it was good to see some of the cruciate victims back in the side.

Peter Kelly is going to be a huge addition to the defence this year, which is saying something because the defence was very strong last year. It was good to see Gary White at centre-back and it’ll be even better to see him get an extended run there.

Shane Connolly was very assured in goals and while he didn’t have too many shots to deal with, his confidence under the dropping ball was another reminder of why he’s become such a vital asset.

Further afield the signs are promising as Fionn Dowling buzzed about the place, picking off a couple of nice scores while James Kavanagh showed some flashes of skill when he came in.

It was good to see Kildare back in action but this competition and the inter-county season needs a radical overhaul.