GAA needs to rescue the Boys of Summer.

There is much talk once more amongst the GAA following about the virtues of the split season that has resulted in the All Ireland Finals in football and hurling moving from September to July. All is not well in the world of Ireland's national pastime; that much remains clear, and it increasingly does appear as though the GAA needs to wrestle back the summer limelight.

Where once the GAA Championship season was late-May until mid-September, a dominant beacon of the Irish summer, now we have the scenario where it all starts in April and is wrapped up by late July.

The August Bank Holiday weekend, once the doyen of quarter-final collisions, is now the week after it all ends.

Of course, those in power will stress the split season is a nod to those at the coal-face, the club players up and down the country, but that is to forget that to survive in the mainstream, the GAA must do what it can to protect the core product, the intercounty season – essentially the highest level at which Gaelic Games are played.

Right now, it doesn't feel like that is the case.

In 2024, with all nodding to recency bias, the All Ireland Football and Hurling championships went toe-to-toe with both the European Championships in Germany and the Olympics in Paris. Whilst the GAA is a behemoth on Ireland's sporting landscape, it would be folly not to accede to the idea it is parochial in the extreme. On that basis, taking on mainstream sports head-on is far from ideal.

The meat of the GAA season went directly in against the Euros this summer. The Wimbledon, Royal Ascot, two golf majors, and the Olympics were all crowded spaces.

Key provincial championships also went up against the end of England's Premier League and the Champions League final.

Of course, in the old format, the All-Ireland series would run up against the re-emergence of cross-channel soccer from summer slumber, but crucially, those new beginnings would come when the GAA had distilled itself down to semi-finals and finals.

Less is more come August and September, and it would have made it easier for our national games to compete in that shop window. While the Premier League's millionaires were getting back up to speed, the GAA was at the business end, unveiling the best the championships had to offer inside Croke Park.

Now, it does really feel like the intercounty GAA season is a rushed affair. Week after week, the same teams are playing, with little reflection on important wins or time to reassess after tough losses.

As an example, no apology is offered for using Donegal as the template this summer as Jim McGuinness' second coming made the Tir Conaill outfit one of the stories of the season.

Donegal dispatched Derry in Celtic Park on April 20th in their Ulster SFC quarter-final. They lost their All-Ireland semi-final against Galway on July 14th. Eight championship encounters in 12 weeks and now a six-month abyss before the National League returns. It's a formula that surely doesn't benefit anyone.

The players are asked to dig deep across a short span of time, with little respite, but so too are the supporters. Donegal in that span of eight games were only at home once with trips to Castlebar, Cork, Clones and twice to Dublin ensuring that those to whom it matters most were hit in the pocket very hard.

'Nothing beats being there' was a GAA slogan in recent seasons but given ticket prices, travelling expenses and overnight costs of accommodation, it would be foolish to believe the average family can sustain their support over less than three months in that scenario.

Above all else, though, the window of opportunity for the GAA is being closed too tight. Armagh held off Galway in the football final on July 28th, a timid enough affair, a week after Clare and Cork served up a hurling decider for the ages.

The end result was that with multiple days still left in the month July, the GAA was ready to slip from the public consciousness on a national scale. Another misnomer is that this shortened intercounty season would pave the way for earlier starts in county championships. Bar for those counties that graced the semi-finals, the season was a memory before June had ended. But for the ordinary club player, July and early August aren't really a time to be getting fully focused on Championship outcomes.

The summer is the summer. There are holidays, festivals, weddings and life to get on with, especially for those that portray the true amateur ethos of the GAA. The summer will never be the summer without the GAA, and yet, in an act of apparent self-harm, the Gaelic Athletic Association is distancing itself from the very thing that makes it special.

Until they take back ownership of August, at the very least, those prophetic lyrics from Don Henley will ring true - the summer's out of reach.

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