Galway GAA Discussion Thread #2

Think the leak will concern them though...

yes every club sets high standards but you don't write it down and hand it out like your back in school. these are adults not a bunch of 14 year old kids. Rumour has it that his not manager anymore. It has to be remembered that it's an amateur sport

They are paid professionals with contracts earning extraordinary amounts of money of course they are going to have a written code of conduct

There's an article in the Irish independent shedding a lot of light on it. Here's a small bit:

A club source has accepted that the wording on the statement could have been less strident, but that the sentiments were coming from the players themselves.

“It was [as a result of] a discussion between the players and management,” the source told the Sunday Independent. “The players came back to the management and said this is the feedback from the year. We feel we didn’t put enough effort in, we feel we didn’t put enough work in during the summer.

​“We had nine or ten lads who went to America playing hurling for the summer. They came back but they didn’t have the work done from a conditioning perspective.”

The source, who asked not to be named, also said there had been “a bit of a drink culture in the squad” and the players wanted to move away from that.

Clarinbridge reached the county final in 2021, losing to St Thomas’s, when managed by Jarlath Niland, father of county player Evan. The following year they lost in the semi-finals to Loughrea.

This year, under new manager David Forde and with coaching assistance from former Limerick hurler Niall Moran, they were eliminated again by Loughrea at the quarter-final stage. Forde was centre-back for the club when they won the All-Ireland title in 2011 and the team has reasonable prospects of winning a senior championship in the next few years.

With several first-team players away on J1s, Clarinbridge weren’t in a position to prepare for the championship with a full hand. The club source said that all of this had been agreed with the leadership group which included seven senior players and had the backing of the wider group with no dissenting voices.

“The feeing among lads was that if they really want to have a crack at winning a county championship, they needed to make more sacrifices. If you want to go for a J1, if you want to go to Australia for a year, that’s fine. Best of luck to you, you are always Clarinbridge. You can train with us but we can’t have you back a week before the championship and expect to go straight into the senior team. That was the context, that if we want to have a proper crack at the championship we have to do the work.”

The source said the conditions weren’t as inflexible as they read and were written with a degree of “tongue-in-cheek” and they “made sense to the players”. He said the ban on golf wasn’t as intractable as it came across.

“We weren’t banning golf, it was more about lads not missing training because they’ve played 18 holes of golf. You don’t play golf the same day as an important training session. You can’t train with the proper intensity.

“And just doing things at the right time. We had a couple of lads who said ‘oh we’ve booked two weeks in Ayia Napa’ the week before a championship game. They’d been told to book holidays in June, don’t book them in August when we’re playing championship.

“So it’s just those common sense approaches. The club completely believes in a player-led system. This is what the players wanted. The players met themselves, read down through the [charter] items, said that was grand, every single one of them signed off on it.”

​He said the leak of the charter by a player was unintentional. “It wasn’t out of disrespect. He was the first player who signed it actually, saying yes, I need to do it. In the cold light of day it reads a bit crazy but it’s not like that at all, the players are 100 per cent behind it, and behind management, and so is the club.”

He said it had made the club and its management team look like a “deranged dictatorship. Nothing could be further from the truth,” he added.

But if none of it really matters - the training thing is a given, players are not expected to not drink, and playing golf is perfectly fine etc. then why have this 'charter' in the first place. It's looks even sillier when it's argued that it doesn't really count or mean what it says.

It looks to me like there's a Primary school Principal in there somewhere who's used to endlessly drafting various policies and decided that this could be tried in the GAA club as well. Looks to me like a few adult conversations about 'goals' would've done the job. When you're the subject of cringey discussion in a national newspaper it doesn't really matter how benign your initial intentions might have been.

and fined accordingly as they are in breach of their contract. Matic did an interview recently that when at united they collected 75k for players being late to training. Maybe David and the boys from bridge could use this method in collecting the 15k.

Surprised that a game is being fixed for Tuam with the stand roof torn down and the new one under construction by then I presume.

These look class. I think we should petition the county board to make this our away colours

Team that played in Cork over the weekend

I think compared to the "streak" kits we've been getting lately, these look much more classy. We play in the maroon home jerseys much of the time anyway. Something like this in the "proper" colours if you insist would be a big step up.

Can't have a maroon and white away Jersey......

True. I think the current one is white after the notorious camouflage one. Not sure is this blue edition replacing the white version or in conjunction with in. Not that any of them are used very often.

Or a Roscommon away jersey even worse. Same here. No way!!!!!

Scutter jersey.

Good stuff now sell salthill and have proper hurling and football stadia. Duggan park for the hurling. It might tempt the Leinster teams down just off the motorway.