Saturday, November 21, 2009 Previous editions
Saturday, November 07, 2009
MUNSTER football manager Ger O’Sullivan believes that the interprovincial tournaments should be continued indefinitely, even if they have to be played in front of empty stadiums.
The competition’s future has been up for debate for years now due to a dearth of spectators and a failure to decide on a definite date for the games in the log-jammed GAA calendar.
GAA president Christy Cooney has promised the association will support the competitions as long as the players want to play in them and O’Sullivan believes that is the least they deserve.
"Even if there was no-one attending it, given the money that these players generate for the game during the year, it is a small price to pay in return. I have seen the enthusiasm in the training sessions we have had.
"We have had 20-21 players at our sessions on wet nights in Mallow. We have had Tomas O’Gorman coming from Wexford to train and Padraig Reidy played a game for his club and then playing for Munster in the semi-final that night."
That commitment will be matched this weekend when a handful of Joe Kernan’s Ulster players play for their clubs today before boarding flights for London and tomorrow’s M Donnelly final at Ruislip.
There was a time when the old Railway Cup routinely attracted 40,000-plus but recent years have seen the figures slump into the hundreds more often than not. That said, there have been signs of life.
Leinster and Ulster played out a thrilling football final in front of almost 6,000 spectators at Parnell Park four years ago and over 10,000 watched the 2007 final at Croke Park when tomorrow’s contestants were also in action.
That crowd may have been lost amid the cavernous stands at HQ but it demonstrated what could be done with a little promotion and the numbers would undoubtedly have been larger had Leinster been involved.
"People are going back to the days when it was drawing 40-50,000 people and this point has been made a few times about the competition going forward, that there isn’t the interest in it any more," said O’Sullivan.
"At the same time, you had 1,500 people in Crossmaglen for the semi-final between Ulster and Leinster a few weeks ago and that was on an absolutely awful day for football.
"I would just feel — and I know that the other managers would feel the same — that playing it at this time of the year isn’t the best, especially for teams who would have been involved in latter stages of the championship.
"Most managers would feel that the best time to play this is in January before the start of the leagues or during the break weeks in the league and then fit the final in around St Patrick’s Day."
Having staged hurling or football finals in Rome, Paris, Boston and Abu Dhabi, the itinerant competition’s next stop will be the English capital where the game will play a central role in the GAA’s 125th celebrations in Britain.
Both teams will be guests of honour at a celebratory banquet tonight and the hope is that the wind and rain will stay away long enough tomorrow to allow a game befitting the occasion.
Joe Kernan has assembled a star selection to face a Munster side which, although heavily dependant on its Cork contingent, boasts a mix of players from around the province.
"The Ulster team is on paper, very strong," O’Sullivan admitted. "Look at the subs they brought on the last day against Leinster — Tommy Freeman, Conor Gormley all of them All Stars the last few years. On the plus side, we played a strong Ulster team in the semi-final in Fermoy last year and got the upper hand and went on to win the final for the first time since 1999."
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