By Cahair O'Kane

IS there a more frustrating feeling than one of being absolutely powerless?

It is how every club player in Ireland feels. They all have their own theories. Some of them are bonkers. Some of them might be good ideas. It’s impossible to keep the GAA playing population of Ireland all happy. There is no one right answer to all the fixture problems that exist within the organisation.

It’s frustrating but we go on playing anyway. We go on changing work, we go on giving up shifts, we go on giving up a social life, we go on sacrificing maybe the one day off some of us have to play for our clubs. And we do it because we love it.

Right now, though, I feel a bit sick. A bit like there’s very little about the GAA I love any more. The games, surely, I have always, and will always, enjoyed playing them. But the organisation? They make me feel a big bit sick. And a big bit angry.

It wasn’t the top brass that apparently decided to drop Colm Begley for playing a club championship game on Wednesday night. It was Laois manager Tomas Ó Flatharta who made the decision that the Parnells club man won’t feature in the starting line-up for their Leinster championship opener with Wicklow. The big brass just let him do it.

A small part of the problem is that Begley plays his club football in Dublin, where they have enough to worry about without taking cognisance of Laois’ scheduled when planning their club fixtures. It’s not the fault of the Dublin CCC.

Had Begley been playing his club football in his native county, this wouldn’t have happened. But he doesn’t. And his decision to go ahead, apparently against his inter-county manager’s wishes, and play that club championship game deserves the utmost praise.

He lined out at centre-back as his side’s championship campaign was ended by Lucan Sarsfields. Would it have been fair on the rest of the Parnells players to have busted a gut since Christmas to then have to field in a knockout championship game without their best player? Hardly.

But does anybody in Croke Park care? Hardly.

If their silence on the issue is punctured, it will be by more lip service. They don’t care about anything more than they care about income. How else do you explain the fact that Dublin never have to play a championship game outside Croke Park? Income must be maximised. Profit margins must be maintained. Competition? Sure what’s that?

The club fixtures problem is easily fixed. Far more easily than they want to admit. It’s hardly a revolutionary idea to shorten the inter-county season, but that’s what needs to happen. But even though the FRC, whose latest raft of proposals go before Central Council this day week, are suggesting changes, many of them positive, even they have had to take a hit on some ideas.

Eugene McGee admitted during the week that there was no point trying to wrestle any sort of power off the four provincial bodies. It’d be like trying to wrestle a gazelle from a lion’s jaw.

Notably, when you read it, they don’t attempt to shorten the inter-county season. The All-Ireland finals will still be played in September. That’s because they know that they wouldn’t succeed with a proposal for anything else.

Whatever the FRC propose, and whatever they manage to achieve, it will not solve the problems if the inter-county season continues to span from May to the end of September.

Taking club fixtures off county CCC’s and handing control to Croke Park is not a solution. It just isn’t.

But inter-county football is the only thing Croke Park sees. Otherwise why would they allow this to happen? Why would they allow counties to put club games off because they’ve organised challenge games.

Why would they allow counties to put club games off because they’re having a hastily-arranged bonding weekend? Why would they allow counties to postpone the start of the club championship indefinitely, until the county team is out?

We, as club players, are powerless to stop it. They, as administrators, aren’t. They just don’t want to. And that’s the most frustrating, sickening thing of the lot. The fact that it’s ‘them’ and ‘us’ is contrary to everything the GAA is meant to be. There should only be ‘us’.

Fair play to Colm Begley. But now he sits out his county’s first championship game as punishment. Why does any county manager have the right to stop a player taking part in club championship games?

If it was a club league game you’d see through it. “Maybe Laois are going to forget about clubs and start their own u6s and u8s, producing their own players,” read one tweet this morning.

It’s the players you ultimately feel sorry for. County players want to play for their counties, and they want to play for their clubs. Club players just want to play.

It’s those that stop them, and not the like of Colm Begley, that should be punished.

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