Search Results for 'County Board'

It was not easy to get any work done around the house last weekend because of the feast of sport on TV. I have to compliment our terrestrial TV stations for the great coverage of both football and hurling games at this time of the year. They had TV cameras covering 13 championship matches last weekend which is quite incredible.

I am interested to see what kind of a review will take place by the Mayo County Board and I suppose equally fascinated as to who will have the responsibility for carrying out this review. If it was done properly, I believe it would highlight significant shortcomings in our GAA structures locally. If addressed professionally it could present a great opportunity to highlight a number of issues that need to be changed, and if changes were implemented then the review would have served its purpose and be a good thing. We surely now realise that we are breeding players who are not delivering on the big stage. We are producing players that continuously look for excuses and opportunities to apportion blame on others. Of course players are not blameless, but we must look at the system that is producing our inter-county footballers. The review should scrutinise the performance of our county board officers. Someone should take a close look at their roles and benchmark their performance since taking up office. After all players and management are benchmarked by their progress or lack of on the football field. It is as we know a result driven business. For these and other reasons I would suggest that an outside agency, ie, one removed from the local GAA scene should be tasked with conducting the review. However the summer season just does not seem like an appropriate time to conduct interviews and carry out an investigation into what is wrong with our current system. It should be carried out during the winter months, when people have a little more time to discuss issues. I am aware that at least six counties have conducted reviews in the last year, so the template is out there already. Incidentally one of those counties that initiated a review of its current practices of the preparation of its inter-county players was Cork, not a county where you would perceive there to be a problem. But that is an important point too; reviews should be ongoing and not just conducted when there is a problem.

It seems now that Mayo's dreadful display against Cork in the league final earlier this year was not a once off, but a fair reflection of where this team and management currently stands. In that final we played like a division four team. We looked every inch a division four team again last week. I realise that winning performances are not always associated with dazzling displays of individual or team brilliance. A winning performance is achieved by relentless work, harrying, hitting, running, tracking back, tackling, winning dirty balls. This is a basic requisite to be successful in championship football. That's what we wanted from our evening in Sligo. As a result of the defeat Mayo has also missed out on an attractive home tie against our old friends, Galway, in a few weeks’ time. It was planned to coincide with the official opening of the new stand, but that too must be shelved for the time being. This missed opportunity also means a very significant loss of revenue for the County Board and another hit to local businesses.

Mayo would still be allowed compete in this year’s Connacht senior football championship, if a solution to the impasse between the county board and the players can be resolved in time, the Mayo Advertiser has learned this week. “We received an email this week on Monday morning from the Mayo County Board informing us that they would be withdrawing from this year’s championship,” Ita Hannon, secretary of the Connacht Ladies’ Council, told the Mayo Advertiser. When asked if Mayo would be readmitted into the championship, she confirmed that the Connacht Council would let them back in if they asked. “Of course we would let them back in. We’d never stop anyone from playing football.”

Kilkenny GAA Supporters Club reviewed a very successful year for both the club and county at its AGM held in Nowlan Park recently. The well-attended meeting included a number of members of the Kildare-based Supporters Club who travelled to attend the AGM.

Ladies Football monthly county board meeting takes place this Monday night and all clubs are urged to attend.

A local councillor has weighed in to the debate on racism in sport, condemning a recent incident in county Carlow which saw a young Nigerian boy verbally abused at a GAA match.

A well known former inter-county footballer, whose name escapes me at the time of writing, coined the phrase “puke football”! He was referring to the ugly defensive style of play that became de rigueur in Ulster counties in the early noughties. Regrettably that phrase was very much in my mind as I watched some appalling fare in Croke Park last weekend. Teams are just so reluctant to kick the ball these days for fear of giving it back to the opposition. We are consequently presented with a game of handball with practically no creativity and most teams packing their defences for fear of getting caught out by a long kick into a porous defence. Perhaps it is time to look at the “off side” rule in Gaelic football?!

I only got to see one game last weekend and that was the much anticipated replay between Ballaghadereen and Ballintubber on Sunday. The previous encounter was a right rip-roaring clash with Ballintubber denied a famous victory when Andy Moran scored a goal for Ballaghadereen almost at the death, to put his team in front with time almost up. Ballintubber did manage an equaliser deep into injury time and set up the opportunity to witness these two do battle again. The weather was perfect for football and I was really looking forward to a good game. I parked myself with a few of the Crossmolina boys, who were there keeping an eye on proceedings, as they play the winners this Sunday. No note taking required by these boys as Liam Moffett, the Crossmolina manager, was videoing the game from behind us, obviously for closer scrutiny later in the week in his effort to try and orchestrate another county title for the Deel Rovers. Sadly the game never really caught fire and once Ballaghadereen started getting ball into their forwards there was never going to be anything other than a decisive victory for the boys from the east. Andy Moran, who was having a really quiet championship campaign up until last weekend, played like an inter-county footballer and proved to be a right handful for the three defenders who tried to curtail his scoring threat. Andy has perfected the knack of shoving off his marker with his hand and demonstrated this tactic several times throughout Sunday’s encounter.