Split decision

As you may be aware, last week the GAA’s Strategic Review Committee revealed that it was openly exploring the possibility of dividing Dublin and its county board into two halves, “as part of a whole review programme of development and investment”.

Good Jaysus.

As if there weren’t already enough natural obstacles standing between Dublin and its next taste of Sam Maguire glory, these fools want to split an already mediocre team in two and dilute the talent pool by 50 per cent. If Foul Play was not such an enlightened man of the world, he might view this development as part of a vast rural plot to bring the Dubs to their knees and reduce them to a footballing unit on a par with Carlow or London, except with a slightly more plush home ground.

You can dress this one up with all the talk in the world about “blueprints for the future” and “renewal” and “strategic matters” and “investment”, and it is still a turkey of an idea on sporting grounds alone.

Let’s look at the facts. Dublin has a fair-to-middling Gaelic football team. The GAA needs Dublin to be successful in order to boost its profile among the urban young. And the best they can come up with is to turn one ailing county into two insubstantial ones? Hello?

One GAA official was quoted at the weekend as saying: “You must remember that there are 1.4 million people in the [Dublin] region, and two million or more will be there in 20 years time. There’s no way one county board is going to manage that.”

There will indeed be two million souls residing in and around the greater Dublin area by 2020 or so. But how many of these individuals would be interested in playing Gaelic football, or even in watching it?

Foul Play has banged on at length in these pages before about how Gaelic games are becoming something of a niche market in Dublin. To talk about a population of X million or a catchment area of Y billion is to ignore the reality. The amount of people playing GAA in the capital is shrinking rather than growing.

And this is being reflected in the performances of the county at championship level. Dublin, of course, are renowned for winning the Sam Maguire once a decade. The last time was in 1995, with an ageing team full of old warhorses like John O’Leary, Mick Galvin and Charlie Redmond. Since then, nothing. And if this idea eventually gets waved through, nothing ever again.

In four years in charge, Tommy Carr (or “Tom” Carr, as the Irish Times always used to call him) could get no more out of them than a narrow victory over Offaly, a thrashing of Sligo at Croke Park and that unforgettable draw with Kerry in Thurles.

This was something of a comment on Carr’s own managerial talents, true, but it also reflected the generally prosaic nature of the materials he had at his disposal.

How many genuinely good players, championship-class ones, do Dublin now have? Probably only five. Paddy Christie, Darren Homan, Ciaran Whelan, the ever-improving Coman Goggins, and Dessie Farrell, who doesn’t have much left in the tank by this stage.

Otherwise, we are looking at game but limited operators like Martin Cahill (whose day job, I discovered recently, is with the Garda Siochána, ha ha) and Enda Sheehy, and guys who are realistically good club players but not quite proficient enough for the highest levels of championship football, such as Peadar Andrews and Wayne McCarthy.

Dublin may even soon lose the quite useful corner-back Shane Ryan, who has yet to make a decision following Tommy Lyons’ decree that he doesn’t want any of his players lining out for the Dublin hurling XV.

Lyons made a bizarre start to his tenure in the Dubs hotseat with an appearance on Open House a couple of months ago, clad in a sensible cardigan and amiably talking shite with Marty Whelan. The whole farrago led one cruel hack to christen him “the housewives’ choice”.

That aside, however, the early signs have been good, with the new boss displaying a welcome ruthlessness in matters of initial team selection so far. (Foul Play has it on good authority that one player recently cut from the Dubs’ panel was informed of his omission not by Lyons, but with a brief phone call from one of the selectors.)

Given that he almost certainly wouldn’t be in charge of the Dubs by the time these proposed changes take effect, Lyons has little to lose here. Which is probably why he gave the “Dublin x 2” idea a guarded welcome last week, blathering on about how “something radical is needed when you’re dealing with a county of 1.2 million people” and suchlike.

By contrast, his captain Dessie Farrell (or “Des”, as the Irish Times likes to refer to him) and no, I’m not making any of this up) made the eminently sensible suggestion that the best way to increase the numbers playing GAA in Dublin would be to ensure that the county team was doing well.

Amen to that. Indeed, the merest of glances at Dublin’s championship record over the past six years should provide ample reason to forget all about this most indecent of proposals. Why would anyone want to cut the Dubs down to size when they are doing a more than capable job of it themselves?