The Official GAA thread

Leave the game as is for me, only thing id say is that some refs havent a clue and it can spoil games.

 

What do you mean by miles behind .just the pace of the game or the general enjoyment

 

A bit of both, just my own honest opinion, i know people who love the football but dont have much time for the hurling.

The side to side rinse and repeat nature of some football games just doesnt do it for me, although being from Antrim weve never been big into our football.

 

Canton is a gas place to watch the Hurling and Football

You could have an all time great playing against a lad that probably would be on the junior b team at home

 

Anyone know of a cheeky site to watch the GAA..loads of games on / coming up...in fact Cork Limerick is on as I type.

 

The Limerick game is a cracker,cian Lynch just on

Vip.com used to have the games

 

Alas no..I used to have a Gaa sub but they put their annual pass up from £40 to £80 so eff that

Oh well...I'll survive!

 

Great comeback from Cork. They'd need to bring that form into championship.

 

There's a division 2 game on iPlayer on Sunday at 2pm - can watch most of it before the cup final

Sunday, February 26

Allianz Football League Division 2 round 4

Kildare v Derry, Newbridge, 2pm (BBC iPlayer)

 

Ah lads I was at the Kildare Clare match yesterday, haven't a clue how we won....Blessed. Derry will hammer us, unfortunately.

 

Sustainable growth the goal for Gaelic games in Scotland



Wednesday 1 March 2023
By John Harrington

When former Waterford footballer, Niall Considine, landed in Edinburgh in 2009 to study for a Masters in Strength and Conditioning in in Edinburgh University, he joined local GAA club Dunedin Connollys and rolled his sleeves up.

The club had no underage structures at the time, so Considine took it upon himself to lay the foundations for them by coaching Gaelic games in the primary schools in the local area.

That good work eventually led him to becoming Community Development Administrator for Gaelic games in Scotland in 2013, which gave him the remit to develop the juvenile game in the other five Scottish clubs.

He’s been chipping away for ten years now at that coal-face, so it's perhaps timely to gauge just how much has been achieved in that time.

“The landscape has changed quite a bit,” Considine told GAA.ie “When I came over in 2009/2010 there was very little underage GAA going on.

“Tir Conaill Harps in Glasgow used to be a very successful underage club, they had won British Championships in the '90s. They were the only Scottish club that had underage at that time. But at that stage they had regressed quite a bit and were in pretty poor shape by 2010.

“Coatbridge Davitts had started up around 2005 and they were the only really functioning underage club in Scotland in 2010. Tir Chonaill were hanging on a bit but not functioning all that well.

“When I got involved with Dunedin Connollys in terms of their underage that was the beginning of a new underage club, Dunedin Óg, which came into existence in around 2013.

"On the back of that then Ronan McDermott in Clydebank saw there was a bit of movement around underage and was keen to do something similar in Clydebank and got the Glasgow Gaels underage up and running the following year.

“We started organising tournaments but it was a little bit higgledy piggledy in those days, there weren't even set age-groups at the time, it was more who you had.

“Fast-forward to 2023 when we'll have 54 tournaments in Scotland from U-7 up to U-17, and lots of those tournaments will have both boys and girls teams, so you're effectively close to 100 separate tournaments really.

“There's been a big growth there, even when you compare the numbers this year to what they were in 2019 when there were 21 tournaments, with only seven of those for teenagers. This year between boys and girls, there will be 51 tournaments for teenagers.

“Two of our clubs now field from U-7 up to U-17 and two other clubs start at U-11.”



Significant work at underage level by Dunedin Connollys in the last 10 years has brought through a new generation of home-grown players.

There are six GAA clubs in Scotland – Dúnedin Connollys, Tir Conaill Harps, Coatbridge, Dálriada, Glasgow Gaels, and Ceann Creige (hurling only).

As well as helping volunteers in those clubs in whatever capacity he can to grow the game, Considine also does a lot of coaching at schools level too.

“It's pretty extensive,” he says. “I would coach over 3,000 kids a year. With the DFA project and some additional coaching done by club volunteers that would then be up around 3,500 kids coached.

“We used to focus in on the older cohort, P6 and P7, which would be fifth and sixth class in Ireland. But because a number of the clubs have started earlier I've done some P2, P3, P4, and P5 coaching. So we go from P2 to P7 which would be senior infants to sixth class if it was an Irish school.

“The hope is to focus in on the younger cohort going forward so that essentially try to get our recruitment in earlier and then the clubs will be able to retain those players. All going well, more of the school coaching will focus on P2 to P5 rather than P6 and P7.”

Considine’s guiding light is to make Gaelic games in Scotland more home-grown and sustainable.



The Ceann Creige club are doinggreat work developing hurling and camogie in Glasgow.

To better do that, he believes that GAA clubs should market themselves as inclusive sporting hubs for the whole community, rather than bastions of Irish culture only.

“I think at one point there was over 70 GAA clubs in Scotland in the first half of the last century when Irish immigration to Scotland was very high, and back then it was probably quite insular in terms of it was Irish sport for Irish people,” he says.

“When we started Dunedin Óg in Edinburgh we made a very conscious decision that this wasn't for the Irish diaspora, this was for the Edinburgh Community and that the club should reflect that community. So if the local community was primarily Polish, then the club should be primarily Polish.

“In Edinburgh there are very few kids of Irish descent in the club. It's primarily Scots and then you'd have kids with family backgrounds from lots of different countries such as Sri Lanka, Poland, Ukraine and Uganda.

“But it's mainly Edinburgh-born kids with no major Irish links. So the club is very much about being from Edinburgh and representing Edinburgh.

“What I've always tried to get across to the clubs is that if we can become community clubs like a GAA club is in Ireland, then that's what the real strength of the GAA is all about.

“It's about having a close community bond so the people living there feel like the club represents them. And so when the GAA club is successful there's massive support for the club.

“If we're flying the tricolour and painting our faces green and all the rest of it, we're essentially boxing ourselves into a corner. Internationally, that's a poor policy. We need to work with the local communities and become the best of what the GAA should be about. That's very much what I'm trying to encourage the clubs do to.

“Now, it might be a little bit different for clubs like Tir Conaill and Coatbridge who are based in very traditional Irish areas so a lot of their members are Scots, but with Irish ancestry, and they'd have strong connections with Celtic soccer club and Irish culture and things like that.”

Scotland’s proximity to Ireland and the significant number of Irish students and economic migrants in Glasgow and Edinburgh means GAA clubs have little trouble padding their numbers with Irish-born players.

This can lead to on-pitch success such as the British Gaelic Football Championship Dunedin Connollys won in 2018 when Considine was team-manager. It was a fine achievement for the team, but he doesn’t think such silverware should be the barometer by which Scottish clubs are judged.

“That’s not really a club success,” he says. “That was success based on a few lads coming over from Ireland for the previous three years who were very good and that's why we ended up winning the British Championship. Take away two or three of those and we probably wouldn't have done that.

“We've had more success in Edinburgh in bringing through girls to * level than we have with the boys. A number of homegrown players played on British Championship winning teams on the LGFA side.

“There were four on the pitch when we beat the Munster champions in the All-Ireland Intermediate quarter-final and that to me was much more satisfying because you could see that a number of our players were players who came through our own club and we were the only club they had a connection to and they're passionate about that.

“Quite often the Irish players go home for a lot of the summer so if you mainly have Irish people playing in your club then you don't really have a club, you just have a collection of people.

“It's important for international clubs to give Irish people the opportunity to continue to play their games, but they need to look at how they can build the club for their own players and primarily field teams with their own players.

“You should look after the players that come through your own system because that's the only way you can build a sustainable club.

“If you're basing your club on the Irish you might get a few trophies out of it, but you'll never ever have a proper club.”

So how will all the work that Considine is putting into the underage game in Scotland be judged in another ten years time? By the prospect of senior teams being predominantly made up of native-born Scots?

“Yes, that would be my absolute clear focus,” he says. “Tir Chonaill Harps in Glasgow won a junior championship a couple of years back with 14 home-grown players in the squad and nine on the team.

“Coatbridge would have a high number of homegrown players and to me they're the clubs that I would encourage others to aspire to.

“If they're starting here at six or seven years of age and coming through a decent fixtures programme from U-7 up to U-17, then there's no reason that more of them can't reach a standard where they can compete against the Irish guys that come over here.

“We're not going to be producing David Clifford's too often over here, but we can produce decent, athletic, confident players and they should then be able to compete at their own level.

“If they're representing their local community, training together on a regular basis over a period of time over three or four years at * level I see no reason why they can't be become as good or better than the British teams that are mainly populated by Irish lads.

“That has to be the goal. If it's not, then we're just going around in cirlces and we're never really moving forward.”

https://www.gaa.ie/news/sustainable-growth-the-goal-for-gaelic-games-in-scotland/

 

One * of a game of gaelic football. Monaghan never know when they're beat

 

'We Felt The World Of GAA Was Ripe To Have A Film About It'



https://www.balls.ie/gaa/lakelands-film-gaa-longford-552680

 

This should spell the end for Rory Gallagher

 

Would have expected a statement from Derry GAA before now. They'll need to get their act together with the Ulster final on Sunday

 

I am not in the know so I am genuinely asking the question why? All I know is a brief article I saw which said his ex wife accused him of domestic violence which Rory Gallagher says isn't true.