Georgio1 wrote:Whilst I would agree that there is great work going on in Ferbane, the fact is that Shannonbridge have had a fair few players on these teams, which will dilute the pipeline into adult teams.
I also must say that its a farce of a situation to see Ferbane relegated from Junior A and have a team good enough to get to the Junior B final? Seems a little unfair, and pure manipulation of the system to wangle a championship!
I don't think there are THAT many Shannonbridge lads on the underage teams? I don't have the exact numbers but I don't think it's that many?
As for the Junior A\B thing. That Junior B team is basically the Junior C team that won the Championship last year, and also the same Junior A team from last year, so effectively they've just kept the same group of lads together and I don't think that could be called manipulation of the system. It'll be a strange one to see but that Junior A group of lads could find themselves playing Junior B next year and the B's could get promoted up to A football.
Just to make Ferbane's case on this whole thing, it's actually not any dodgy manipulation. MFF is correct in saying that this year's Junior B team is the guts of the junior C team from last year, but the general idea was that the younger players who were going to be training regularly played junior A, while the Junior B's were largely made up of players who were happy to play ball but had no interest in training. Equally, lads like Alan Egan, David Cox and David Kenny, who are good footballers but who don't train for football from one end of the year to the other because hurling obviously comes first for them, were happier playing junior B with other lads who weren't training either.
They were two very distinct squads, so it wasn't a case of putting the better lads on the Junior B team. There was a fairly different age profile too - probably ten years in between the average ages of the squads!
Having said all that, nobody involved really knows what's going to happen now.
Kevin Egan. Signed out of respect for players and all involved with Offaly.
I'd hope the cuman na mbunscol would row in 100% behind the Go Games philosophy and run lots of blitzes throughout the year to give children lots of games, instead of just once off matches between individual schools
especially if there is so much scepticism at club level about the Go Games
