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This is another one where I could answer any of several posts, but here goes anyway. The real elephant in the room is how we're such a dual county. I'll give an example. Two years ago, we were visiting friends in Cork. Yer man there was over his club's U11 team and we went to see them play. I was with my own club's U10s at the time. The standard of hurling I saw from both sides there was far above anything I saw here that year, even allowing for the year's difference in age. Thing is, they were a hurling-only club, in an area where very little football is played at all. My friend told me they had a full programme of Go Games from early March through to end of October - 26 games altogether, and obviously every one of them hurling. They'd begun training in mid-February, and he said they normally continued with a club tournament for a couple of weeks after the actual Go Games finished. That's basically nine months of activity, with every single session being 100% hurling. And then they'd be doing hurling, and nothing but hurling, for their schools as well. By contrast, our Go Games programme that year was just 18 matches, from mid-April through to mid-September, with nine of them hurling and nine of them football. And clubs here are often criticised from certain quarters if they don't split training somewhere around 50/50 or even 60/40 at the younger ages. Easy to see then why the young lads in Cork were generally overall better hurlers than the ones here. This is not to have a go at football. You could equally point out that we'll always struggle to reach our full potential in football too, so long as players spend so much time at hurling as well. It's just to give an example of how it really is the elephant. Pikeman96 (Wexford) - Posts: 3832 - 07/08/2026 15:46:42 2688996 Link 0 |