The Cathal Dervan Column

The bid to rid the GAA of the antiquated Rule 42 and finally open Croke Park to purely Irish sports — those other than Gaelic football, hurling, the Special Olympics and Bono worship — seems doomed to failure.

Sure the GAA will debate the vexed issue at Congress next month, sure the past presidents have actually relented enough to allow a public airing of the views of many of the country’s proudest Gaels.

But there, I’m afraid, the move to open the new Croker and all of its 82,500 capacity to the likes of Brian O’Driscoll and Roy Keane is set to end.

The narrow minds who control the GAA in the north of Ireland are set to triumph once again. The likes of the Antrim County Board, whose views feature elsewhere on these pages, will ensure that the move to change Rule 42 will not receive the two-thirds majority it needs to pass Congress.

In other words, just one-third of the GAA have to vote against change to ensure the wishes of the other two thirds don’t succeed.

It makes no sense to me, in this day and age, to see Croker closed to sports that every single Irish child enjoys as much as Gaelic football or hurling.

I know as much because the majority of the 16 kids who play on the under-11 soccer team I manage in Dunshaughlin also play for the local St. Martin’s GAA club and are proud to do so.

The manager of the under-11 Gaelic football team is a good friend of mine and we do cooperate on things like fixtures and availability, firstly because it makes sense to have the kids involved in as many sports as possible, and secondly because we live in a modern world where sports should get on with each other.

Some elements of the GAA don’t think that way, although they are quite happy to let U2 into Croke Park for two sold-out concerts this summer that will disrupt the GAA season for at least a fortnight while the ground is made ready for Bono and his histrionics.

Thankfully they got a shot across their bows from within this week in a 70-page report from the association’s own marketing sub-committee, published just days after the official opening of the new Hill 16, the final piece in the Croke park jigsaw.

The report, compiled by those who work at selling the GAA to the Irish public, makes for fascinating reading. And it also contains a severe warning for those who wish to maintain the Rule 42 status quo.

“There is a distinct risk that while Croke Park can be viewed in the public mind as exemplifying the best in a new Ireland, the issues raised by ownership and access to Croke Park may por-tray the GAA as an Association that is negative, old-fashioned, political and redolent of an older Ireland. The scale of the achievement may become disconnected from the Association that created it,” says the report.

“There is an emerging risk that where Irish national teams in other codes find that they have to play home matches outside of Ireland, there may be a negative reaction to the GAA brand among the general public and possibly among some of the Association’s own members.”

The GAA management should circulate the document to all the county boards before they attend congress next month. It might change a few minds but I doubt it, most of them are set in centuries of crap.

Meanwhile, I want to share a lovely line from the Horslips drummer and Evening Herald journalist Eamonn Carr, now back in the news after the release of the wonderful Roll Back album.

Asked recently by a fellow hack if there was any truth in the rumor that Horslips are going to support U2 at Croker, Eamonn replied in the negative.

Then he added, “I’d love to do it though – just to wear a Bohemians shirt on stage at Croke Park!”.

He was joking of course, but it’s a story worth repeating as stuckinthemud-itis grips the GAA once again.

We Don’t Want Wailing Wall

Brian Kerr was relaxed as he addressed the media in a Dublin hotel on Tuesday afternoon, just as Hardy Eustace was going to the line for a second successive Champion Hurdle at Cheltenham.

The Irish manager, clearly not a racing man, was back in front of the cameras to announce the squad for next week’s game in Israel and, Aiden McGeady’s omission aside, it was quite a predicable and quite a respectable list of 23 players.

The good thing for Kerr is that the national focus has been on other things in recent weeks. Last weekend the spectacular collapse of the Grand Slam dream on the day our rugby coach Eddie O’Sullivan was taught a lesson by his French counterpart Bernard Laporte dominated the barroom dialogue.

This week Cheltenham is all the rage, a festival that began in spectacular fashion for the Irish with three winners on Tuesday and the first five in the Champion Hurdle.

Next week though, after the Triple Crown match in Cardiff, Kerr has the national stage to himself ahead of the crucial game in Tel Aviv.

I hope it works out well for him, I really do. We all want to be back in Germany next summer, 18 years after Ray Houghton put the ball in the English net.

A win in Tel Aviv will go a huge way towards realizing that dream, a draw will help the state of progress. A defeat and we could be visiting the Wailing Wall on the way home.

Whatever, the game seems certain to go ahead. The sooner the better.

Heroes Of the Week

Padraig Harrington loves a night out at the dogs so I’m sure he won’t object if he’s lumped in with another punter’s favorite. Harrington’s breakthrough win on the PGA Tour in the U.S. was well worth staying up for on Sky Sports on Sunday night and hopefully is a sign of things to come in the majors, maybe even the Masters. Likewise Hardy Eustace produced the stuff of champions to win a second successive Champion Hurdle on Tuesday. Both man and horse did Ireland proud this week.

Idiot Of the Week

What goes around comes around, so I suppose we shouldn’t really complain about a Six Nations referee. A fortnight ago England were whining about Jonathan Kaplin’s performance against Ireland and last Saturday it was the turn of the boys in green to cry foul over a referee and his handling of a crunch game at Lansdowne Road. England’s Tony Spreadbury made two crucial mistakes in the game that cost Ireland the Grand Slam and failed to red card Benoit Baby for a blatant head butt on Brian O’Driscoll. Hopefully we won’t see Mr. Spreadbury with a whistle in his hand for a long, long time.

Sideline Views

SOCCER: Fair play to Liverpool manager Rafael Benitez. Anxious to watch the Manchester United-AC Milan game before his team’s own Champions League triumph away to Bayer Leverkusen, he walked into an Irish bar in Cologne on Tuesday night of last week and was promptly greeted by a pub full of Reds fans. Benitez stood his ground and his round apparently. “It was like Jesus walking into a room,” said Liverpool fan Allen Baynes. “As soon as he set foot in the place Hernan Crespo headed the ball past Tim Howard and Manchester United were out of the Champions League.”

SNOOKER: England’s Ronnie Rocket O’Sullivan won the Irish Masters title at Citywest on Sunday, but the best story of the night concerned a spectator who fell asleep in the middle of the final and was awoken when security guards alerted him to the fact that his mobile phone was ringing loudly and upsetting the players. Said fan refused to switch it off or leave the arena and was eventually escorted out by the police. And who said snooker was boring?

SOCCER: The award for wacky story of the week goes to the former Brazilian footballer Romario, whose wife is about to have their sixth child. Romario’s dream is to have enough children to form a team of his own, and apparently he expects his spouse to have at least another two sons while he has also frozen five tubes of his own sperm for future use!

ATHLETICS: Ireland rejoiced when Mark Carroll gave everything to help Alistair Cragg to the gold medal in the 3,000 meter finals at the European Indoor Championships in Madrid last Saturday week. How strange then that days later the government should pull all its funding from the Corkman. Cruel is about the only way to describe the Irish Sports Council’s treatment of Carroll and the likes of Peter Coughlan and James Nolan.

RACING: Best Mate’s trainer Henrietta Knight believes a virus picked up in Ireland over Christmas is one of the reasons why her triple Gold Cup winner is out of Cheltenham’s big race on Friday after breaking a blood vessel on the gallops. I hope she doesn’t think the virus was passed on deliberately. We’d never do a thing like that, would we?