Joe Brolly continued his campaign to radically change the GAA season on RTE Sunday Sport yesterday. He alleged that many of the top Ulster players were unemployed and were unable to establish a career outside of the game because of the demands of inter-county football.
Six current county players phoned me during the week and told me they didn't want to go public on this but they wanted to talk about what was happening and they were relieved - can you believe this? - they were relieved someone had come forward to talk about this. This is like whistleblowers in the tobacco industry...
We're drifting towards a thoroughly dysfunctional GAA where you're going to have players without a life from 20 to 30. You know, the ones at the top will get endorsements from the GPA, they'll drift from scholarship to scholarship, they're propped up. What happens when they get to 30? What happens then ?
DCU's Niall Moyna grew so annoyed at Brolly's analysis that he rang into the programme, Liveline style, to question Brolly's anaylsis.
Joe throws out anecdotes. I'm a scientist and I deal in facts. I've managed DCU or 14 years and of the things I proudest of, only one of the players on those panels did not graduate.
The first team that won the Sigerson in 2006, six players have received their PhDs.
Brolly said he didn't dispute that college was a useful back-up to lads who were training to be, in essence, professional footballers but said he had read Michael Murphy's DCU and was staggered to learn he was training three times a day. He noted that at last year's medal presentation to the Glenswilly seniors, Murphy was sipping water because he had weight training at 8.00 the following morning.
Moyna defended his management of Michael Murphy with DCU.
Michael Murphy, in four years, did no strength or conditioning training at DCU and I should know. We have stopped all our conditioning because all we were doing was duplicating what the counties were doing.
Brolly insisted that Moyna was defending himself against an accusation that Brolly hadn't made and said he didn't know what Moyna was talking about.
Moyna finished by saying 'I think it’s quite obvious you don’t know what I’m talking about.'
