Lone Shark wrote: ↑Sat Nov 04, 2023 2:48 pm
There's a lot of good stuff in that post from Jimbob, much of it inarguable. There's no doubt that an U-20 competition run through the summer is an advantage to standalone clubs, for all the reasons mentioned there.
However the nature of U-20 competitions in hurling and football are such that there is no good time of year for them, and that includes October. The fundamental problem is that these are (in theory) development competitions, designed as a stepping stone for those players who are too old for minor, but not yet able to make a significant impact at adult level. Witness all the caterwauling from those clubs across the country who want minor to go to U-18, since they feel that U-20 doesn't give players a full programme of games. And to be honest, they're right.
Of course the problem is that since it's the GAA, we call it a development competition, but it's not, which is why you have the likes of Adam Screeney and Charlie Mitchell shooting the lights out for KK against Na Fianna. By no rational measure do these lads need this competition for their own development as players, but they are eligible, and so KK will want them to play, for understandable reasons.
So you now have this competition which is wedged into a very crowded schedule for the likes of those lads, but also needs to provide games for other players who don't get many. Not so much in KK, where there are four adult teams and every lad above minor is likely to have got a full season with one of the four, but certainly to a greater degree in some other clubs where maybe there's only two adult teams, and the option is one level that they can't quite get to, and another team that is a very "casual" setup.
Okay - so October, what do we think about that?
Well the first problem is that while this year, every Offaly football club in Leinster crashed out at the first hurdle, we'd like to believe that's not the norm. Even if you don't have any team getting to a Leinster final, it wouldn't have taken a lot to go differently for Daingean and Tullamore to have won their games, which would mean that right now, Offaly would have players committed to five different teams in Leinster, affecting a host of different U-20 sides in both football and hurling.
So you either have to bite the bullet and get clubs to accept that we're going to play games on Friday nights and if that means that a player from Daingean has to play U-20 with St. Vincent's on Friday night and then play Leinster JFC with Daingean at 2pm on Saturday, Offaly GAA are going to make him do that.
Or, the alternative, is that you have U-20 competitions that are riddled with postponements.
Problem number two is that in the summer, lads are around. They might be up on tractors, or working other jobs, but as a general rule, they're around home. In October and November, they're not, and clubs aren't going to be able to work it so that guys in college in Dublin and Limerick can come home for club U-20 training on a Wednesday night. So to your point that playing in Summer means that Tullamore and KK can prepare much better than St. Vincent's or SBK, you are correct - but all putting games in October and November means, is that nobody can prepare properly, even if they want to.
Problem three is that while schools and colleges accept that up until mid October, players will have a fair amount of club commitments, they'll start getting cranky if those players are still only dipping in and out by mid-November. And in some cases - again, the Screeneys and the Mitchells of this world - they're so good that they'll still be integral to their teams, whether that's Sigerson/Fitz/Freshers etc., for the majority of players, that's not the case. You tell someone back in Offaly that a player can't come back to train with his club U-20 team because he's fighting for his place with the UL intermediates, and they'll think you're joking. But a game between the UL and NUIG intermediate hurlers is a bloody good standard, and certainly a lot better than you'll see in the vast majority of Offaly U-20 club games.
There's one lad here in Roscommon that I get on well with, he's a regular with the Roscommon senior hurlers, who are generally a Nickey Rackard Team. He said to me before that the best training he ever did was with UL intermediates. Seánie Geraghty, who is Meath captain (a McDonagh Cup team in 2024) said something similar about hurling with DCU's second team, that it brought him on in a way that hurling with Meath just couldn't.
We want Offaly players playing on these teams, just the same as we want to see St. Brendan's/SME/Coláiste Choilm/Gallen/CNC/Killina etc. going well in their respective competitions, and presumably we want to see the Offaly Combined Schools teams (hurling and football) going well too. That cannot happen if we're expecting the majority of our 17, 18 and 19 year-old lads to only give those teams their full focus from December onwards.
Just to be clear, I'm not actually advocating for Summer, any more than I'm saying that late Autumn and early Winter is wrong - not at all. Like I said, it's an excellent post from Jimbob that makes a lot of sense, with cogent arguments behind everything laid out therein. I'm just saying that these are competitions that exist for legacy reasons, but if they weren't already around and with some amount of tradition attached, we'd never invent them, because they are deeply impractical. And whenever you play them, there will be positive and negative aspects.
It's entirely natural that when we play these games in the Summer, we'll look at the green faraway hills and say that maybe we should consider October/November, and just the same, if we were playing at that time of year, we'd naturally look at the summer and say that we wouldn't have to deal with schools/colleges/travel costs/wet pitches and all the rest of it if we switched back.