I was surprised to hear a clip of Sean Boylan using dressing room language on the radio this morning with respect to issues in the compromise rules series – as one of the longest serving football managers in the GAA, he has a reputation for being one of the nicest and most politeThe anger was provoked by the Australian claim that the Irish team started the fighting during the second game of the compromise series rules yesterday at Croke Park. There is clearly something very wrong when Boylan gets stung to strong language on the radio, and even more so when it is about the fight, not the match (which we lost, by the way)
Many people are now saying that the compromise rules series should be abandoned since it brings the game into disrepute; it is now no more than an eighteenth century style faction fight at a time when the GAA is desperately trying to keep violence out of the game. Whoever starts the fight, the fact is that we lose, consistently, both in the fighting and the football to the Aussies who are clearly both harder men than us and more skillful, on and off the ball.
A big problem with the GAA is that is has no international dimension, and the compromise rules series is merely a hoked-up gimmick which is neither pure GAA nor Aussie rules. Having feeble teams from New York and London is token teams in the football championships is not a meaningful international dimension either. Without proper international series, founded on a worldwide set of rules, the GAA is at a disadvantage compared to Soccer or Rugby.
I have a novel idea, which will be enormously unpopular. Aussie rules are more entertaining, competitive, faster and produce a more high-scoring game, and much closer in spirit to Hurling than the lame football we play here now. Lets dump the existing rules as played here in Ireland, dump the round ball, adopt the Aussie Rules as the world standard rules for Gaelic Football, with maybe one or minor changes and see if we can’t actually make a real world game out of our native sports.
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