This Sunday sees the Leinster Club hurling final between Cuala and Kilcormac Killoughey take place in O’Moore Park, Portloaise, while the Galway county final between Liam Mellows and Gort will be staged in Pearse Stadium.

The GAA off-season is getting shorter by the year, but the controversies that rage during them keep on keeping on. There’s no harm in that. Sure what would we do if we had nothing to talk about?

Cuala are the hottest of favourites to retain their Leinster crown and there will be no surprise if they achieve that comfortably.

Only then can they take a few weeks off before resuming in February – in the middle of the national football and hurling leagues it must be remembered.

Restructuring

The club versus county issue is getting an airing right now, which is no surprise as the changes to the football and hurling championship structures sink in with club managers, players and administrators.

In the guise of easing the late summer calendar for the club player, the changes have instead removed most county players out of the club scene from November to mid-summer.

All serious county teams are already back in training, preparing for games in the O’Byrne Cup, Walsh Cup, Munster League, McKenna Cup etc..

So where does all of this leave us?

In Clare, the manager of the county football champions Kilmurry Ibrickane has threatened to pull his players from the county panel such is the battle for their services. He isn’t the first and he won’t be the last.

The players’ voices in all of this, were we to hear them, would be drowned out, but we’re not hearing them. How do a couple of talented footballers from west Clare feel about their club manager telling their county manager publicly that the club is threatening to make them unavailable for the upcoming national league?

We are hearing from managers, administrators, the recently formed but stop start Club Players Association and various GAA talking heads like Joe Brolly. Where are the players themselves?

The easy finger point here is the GPA, but the players I talk to just want to play, not talk. Most have little time for GAA politics, seeing it as the remit of the recently retired or full-time pundits. Within reason they’d play every weekend if it were possible, for club or county. It’s everyone else that is making it hard for them.

The Galway senior hurling championship started on 8 April this year. They played five rounds of a league format before eventually hitting the knockout stages. Thirty odd hurlers were part of the Galway county side and luckily for them their summer lasted to the very end.

There are 12 teams in the Galway senior championship, so we are looking at 300 senior hurlers across the county, 270 of which had to twiddle their thumbs until the 30 were finished bringing Liam McCarthy home on the first Sunday in September.

It took Galway seven games to win this year’s championship, yet as recently as 1996 Galway played one hurling championship game a year, an All-Ireland semi-final in August. Lose that and they were gone.

Win every championship game next summer and it will again take them seven matches to retain the Liam McCarthy Cup. How did that happen?

The answer probably lies in how we do things in this country and how we certainly do them in the GAA. When something is wrong, our first corrective measures are nearly always over-corrective. Over time we eventually land on the right solution, but not before finding 20 wrong ways to fix what was the original problem.

Today the most pressing problem is the intensity of team preparations at county level, which is closely followed by the serious (and wealthy) clubs. While the introduction of more games does at least reduce the ratio of training to games, it still places huge burdens on county players. As a result we are seeing no dual players, intercounty careers being shortened and a spike in serious, long-term injuries. The escalating financial costs are another concern.

However, it is the training intensity that is driving the real wedge between clubs and counties.

ELITE players

The unspoken fear is that the day will come when the county player and the club player become separate entities, akin to what has happened for example to rugby players, who no longer play any rugby for the clubs that introduced them to the game.

The GAA family has always felt that the lack of actual money for playing the game sheltered us from that harsh reality, but that’s where we’re headed.

It is unfair to expect the elite players at county level to shout stop. It’s not their role. Right now they just want to be the next Henry Shefflin or Bernard Brogan.

But think about this, a few short years ago Con O’Callaghan could aspire to be both. Not any more.

If you want to see the most electrifying hurling forward available to Dublin you will have to go to football matches next summer. That sums up the crisis that has now evolved.