Silly charade of named teams needs to end
With one hand Peter Keane gives — reopening the gates to Fitzgerald Stadium to supporters to watch Kerry training.
With the other he takes away — a dummy team for the second week in a row.
Kerry have rarely indulged in the practice. Six years ago, Éamonn Fitzmaurice took the unusual step of releasing his Munster final team early because it had been leaked he was going to drop Kieran Donaghy for the decider and yet the 15 named took to the field.
“That’s (dummy teams) not something we’ve done before in Kerry and I don’t see Éamonn Fitzmaurice being the one to start it; he’s an honourable guy,” said former manager Pat O’Shea at the time.
“Training sessions have been behind closed doors so the public aren’t aware of what’s going on... to try and keep the plans secret so it’s disappointing that the information got out early.”
Two years ago, Fitzmaurice did go down the route of making late changes to his announced team but then those three switches were understandable as they were for the All-Ireland semi-final replay against Mayo, which came a week after the drawn game.
For all six Munster finals Fitzmaurice’s Kerry played, the five they won and the one they drew, the team named was that which lined out.
That was the case for Keane in his debut senior provincial decider last month until it came to the Super 8 when the four 11th hour changes against Mayo to the side issued the previous Friday night were followed by another three for Sunday’s duel with Donegal.
In Croke Park on Sunday evening, The Kerryman’s sports editor Paul Brennan asked Keane about that policy and his decision not to reveal his substitutes for the second game running. Keane’s attitude was everyone else is doing it so why can’t we?
“It’s my first year into it and next thing you see somebody else and they are only firing out 15 and you are saying ‘I’m throwing out everything to some fella’. The 26-man panel has to go in (to Croke Park) on Thursday morning at 9 o’clock.”
Keane then asked Brennan when he knew of the Donegal selection. Donegal had not announced a team and the one they issued to the GAA for the purposes of the match programme had three alterations to the one that began the game. When Brennan admitted he did not know, Keane responded: “Well, that is the answer.”
The stipulation no changes can be made to the squad issued to Croke Park on Thursday morning meant Keane was down to 25 players as he had named foot injury victim David Moran while Declan Bonner also had to do without sidelined Neil McGee who he had named on his team.
Bonner made no apologies for not announcing his team or making such late changes.
“I think you should go with squad numbers. We named a squad by late Wednesday evening for Thursday morning and we lost two key players that were in that 26 that could not tog out so we were left with 24 players that we could not change. It is a ridiculous rule that needs to change so we can go with squad numbers.”
Earlier on Sunday, James Horan had taken three out of the 15 he put out to the public on Friday night.
Although there were no switches for the Kerry game, there had been two against Galway and four against Armagh. He too has been disinclined to show his hand regarding substitutes, a move that appears to have been motivated by Dublin’s long-standing aversion to it.
Dublin have never shied away from dummy teams and their line-up showed three changes to that announced just hours beforehand. Once revealed on Thursday evenings, Tyrone now don’t show their hand until the day of the game and it has been known to include a change or two.
The carry-on obviously works — Cork, Meath and Roscommon have been a lot more consistent than the five still alive in the Championship. But the inaccuracy of the teams announced detracts from the build-up to games never minds devalues match programmes.
On the other hand, expecting teams not to change from a Thursday to a Saturday or Sunday as they play one weekend after another is folly and more understanding of managers’ situations has to be taken into account.
We’ll repeat what we have called for before in this column: Non-negotiable match-day squad lists announced in time for match programme publication purposes and non-negotiable starting teams released an hour before throw-in. Issue squad numbers and provide followers with something they can trust. Surely we’re all too old now for charades.
john.fogarty@examiner.ie
What Lowry teaches us
The power of visualisation received a major endorsement from golfer Shane Lowry on Sunday, albeit inadvertently.
Recalling his final round in Portrush, he said: “I was so calm coming down the last. I couldn’t believe it. What a day. I told Bo (Martin) that I couldn’t stop thinking about winning it for the first six holes and he told me, ‘just stay with me’. What a job he did.”
Caddie Martin certainly did a job, but Lowry hardly gave himself enough credit: Imagining himself with the Claret Jug was a good thing.
Visualisation has worked for Lowry already this year — in winning the Abu Dhabi HSBC Championship — and to greatly help his cause in the Masters, he had pictured his two-year-old daughter, Iris, in a “little white suit”, as his mascot caddie on the traditional par 3 competition at Augusta.
Clearly, it works for the Clara man, but what works for so many when they think of Lowry is the man’s ordinariness. Here is somebody of GAA royalty, who has scaled the heights of the world of golf, but looks for photographs and selfies with inter-county players, who breaks from tournaments, like the Irish Open, to attend the Mayo versus Galway qualifier, and who has made good use of the GAAGo app when he is abroad. He, like us, is a fan.
There are no sports events like All-Ireland finals for Lowry and the GAA impressively refected that connection by keeping supporters abreast of his progress during Sunday’s Super 8 games, on Croke Park’s big screens.
A Lowry coming to the fore in a five-in-arow chasing year — we really should have known.
Super 8 ain’t too great
With the possibility of doing away with the Croke Park element of the Super 8, there may be one last attempt by the GAA to convince units of its appeal in its final year of experimentation in 2020.
The stadium has become such a husk of a place for Dublin’s Super 8 games there.
Sunday’s double-header brought more life to the place but there were still less than 50,000 in attendance.
The crowds that head to Castlebar and Omagh on the August bank holiday weekend will add the type of excitement that was so clearly visible in and around Killarney before the ball was thrown in last Sunday week.
But on the flipside there will be the significantly sparser Páirc Uí Rinn and Páirc Tailteann.
The Super 8s have demanded more of players but, perhaps more importantly for the GAA, they have asked a lot of supporters as is evident by the figures. Mayo’s inclusion has meant an improvement from last year, yet not enough to carry what is a flawed structure. And it is grossly unfair on both followers and footballers to ready themselves for an All-Ireland semi-final a week after the conclusion of the Super 8s.
Monaghan last season should have had more time than eight days to embrace a first semi-final in 30 years.
And there is the all-important competitiveness.
For the second year in a row, Roscommon have been unable to break the glass ceiling as Donegal, Dublin, Kerry, and Tyrone once again go into the last weekend either qualified or vying for All-Ireland semi-final spots. Does it take eight more games to discover what we already would have suspected?
