Jim McGuinness calls for clarity and integrity in the GAA fixture calendar

That’s the issue he and many other managers now face coming into the final round of the league with a final on the horizon. 

Tyrone had just beaten Donegal in Letterkenny on a 0-25 to 0-19 point scoreline, a game that was at once instructive and inconclusive, depending on where you were looking from.  

For Tyrone, their life in Division 1 was hanging in the balance. For Donegal, it was an exercise in doing enough without doing too much. And for McGuinness, it was an opportunity to take aim at a fixture calendar that has once again squeezed a competition, he believes, into the margins of the conversation. 

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“No, definitely not,” he said when asked if Donegal’s approach had anything to do with disregarding the league final. “I think the league finals are brilliant. They should enhance the league final and try to get as close to a full house as possible. 

“The best way to do that is to say there’s a window for Donegal and every other team in Division 1 that they can get after and really just do everything in their power to be in that league final and play in front of a big crowd because it doesn’t affect or impact their preparations for the championship.  

“That’s all that has to happen, it’s pretty straightforward. If there’s a two-week gap, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation.” 

That conversation is one that is as familiar as it is circular. The split season was supposed to remove the guesswork from the calendar, but in reality, it has only shifted the pieces around the board.  

In a world where provincial championships still hold sway, the league final now looks to be the sacrificial lamb. There is no room for it to be anything other than an awkward add-on. 

“People will end up looking at all the scenarios and making decisions for them,” McGuinness said. “People in Donegal don’t care about people that make fixtures in Dublin – they only care about Donegal. People in Armagh only care about Armagh and so on. 

“My gripe would be that when the championship finishes, and we got knocked out in the semi-final so fairly deep into it, there was a six-week gap to the start of the club championship. And that’s a round-robin, and half of those games mean nothing. That’s all money, nothing else.” 

None of this is new ground. The suspicion that fixture-making has long since become a process driven more by the ledger than the calendar is one that has been voiced by managers and players up and down the country.  

But McGuinness’s frustration is heightened by the fact that what could be an event, what should be a marquee date in the league season, is instead something teams have to hedge against rather than target outright. 

“It’s all money,” he said. “That’s what it is. I’m not gonna have that argument and then people saying ‘you’re disrespecting the integrity of the league’ because we’re going back-to-back, back-to-back, back-to-back in games. No. It’s finding a week and allowing people to get after it properly.” 

The difficulty, of course, is that there is no consensus on what the league should be. Is it a competition in its own right, deserving of full focus from start to finish? Or is it just a warm-up act for the championship, a chance to fine-tune, a testing ground?  

The answer is different in different counties, depending on circumstances. For Tyrone, Sunday’s game was about survival. For Donegal, it was about managing loads and keeping an eye on the road ahead. 

That much was clear in the selection. There was no sense of panic at the loss, no great hand-wringing at the sight of Tyrone pulling away in the closing stages. McGuinness, as ever, had bigger concerns than the scoreboard. 

That included his thoughts on the new rules, particularly the two-point free, which he considers an unnecessary solution to a problem that did not exist. 

“Why would you want to foul?” he said. “I’ve never seen a manager going out telling somebody to foul. How do you get around that in a dressing room? 

“How do you have that conversation with fellas in a dressing room, that scenario? Defend bloody well and win the ball. You can’t say ‘foul for a long one’. That’s not a thing. That isn’t a thing. 

“Managers don’t want any fouls. Any other manager is the exact same. If you have a situation where you’re an inter-county manager and you have a Colm McFadden or a Paddy McBrearty or David Clifford and he’s standing at the top of the arc with 30 seconds over the bar, you’re telling me that’s worth the value of 66 percent of a goal?” 

McGuinness, for all that he sees the game through the prism of systems and structures, has never been one to accept change for the sake of it. The two-point free, he feels, tips the balance too far in one direction, giving too much away for too little. It is, in his view, another tweak that answers a question nobody was asking. 

“That’s not chiming in my head,” he said. “If you get two of those, with no pressure, alright, from play, if you lose your man, you drop the shoulder, go on to your left, back on your right, you’re well out – there’s a bit in that. Two points outside the arc from play, fine. 

“But a free for an inter-county inside forward. That’s a bit like the mark we had last year, where you kick the ball 13 metres. That was your bread and butter, if you weren’t able to win the ball you weren’t on the team. Now we’re saying it’s worth a point because you get a point out of it. The value of that isn’t chiming.” 

He has his plan, of course. He always does. Donegal will recalibrate, take stock, and plan for Mayo. And then for Derry. The road ahead is mapped out. The problem, in McGuinness’s view, is that the planners of the game don’t seem to know where they’re going.