Replying To Pikeman96: "Again, an alternate view -
Hurling remains strong and popular in all the areas where it's always been strong and popular, and where people remain willing to develop and promote it.
It remains weak or even non-existent in all the places where people have little or no interest in doing anything to foster it in the first place. Won't even agree to basic Go Games for Under 10s!
As I keep pointing out - all the resources and supports in the world won't bring on hurling in those places if the local clubs don't want to work at it anyway. Horse, water, and drink."
Agree 1million percent with your last paragraph.
To give a perfect example, I have a 1st cousin from Thurles in Tipperary. (My aunt married a Tipp man and moved there!)
My cousin married a Donegal woman and moved up to her home place and are settled there. Football only club.
Few years back he made the drive to start the hurling with the underage academy. Got the green light from the club executive, got the resources and funding sorted himself for hurleys / helmets. Basically himself and another father from Offaly doing the whole lot.
There was a bit of buy in at the start but it just fell to the wayside after a while. Novelty for a few months but then the football coaches, parents and the club decided that that's enough of that craic now. Back to football.
My cousin put a lot of time and effort into this but as you said horse water drink.
They don't want the distraction of hurling. It's not on their radar.
You could bring Cian Lynch, Brian Hayes or even Jimmy Barry Murphy upto some clubs but you can't promote hurling to people who refuse to have it promoted to them
Replying To CastleBravo: "I agree with this, the "hurling needs to be promoted" line always seems to boil down to 2 arguments;
1. That 10s of thousands of people in non-hurling counties would actually dearly love to play and support hurling but as soon as anyone in these counties gets onto their club or county board they forget what hurling is and repress it instead. Why this grá for hurling is invisible is a strange one to make sense of.
2. The Liam Griffin theory that hurling isn't popular in these counties because their populations are just too thick to realise it's the greatest game on earth. The idea that large numbers of people know exactly what hurling is but have little interest in playing it is simply unthinkable- it's obviously just incompetence by the GAA to sell it to them."
I'm a big fan of Griffin. I cannot comprehend how anybody could not love hurling. It is far beyond sport.
Comparing hurling to sport is like comparing the Atlantic Ocean to a pothole after it rains.
Replying To CastleBravo: "I agree with this, the "<i>hurling needs to be promoted</i>" line always seems to boil down to 2 arguments;
1. That 10s of thousands of people in non-hurling counties would actually dearly love to play and support hurling but as soon as anyone in these counties gets onto their club or county board they forget what hurling is and repress it instead. Why this grá for hurling is invisible is a strange one to make sense of.
2. The Liam Griffin theory that hurling isn't popular in these counties because their populations are just too thick to realise it's the greatest game on earth. The idea that large numbers of people know exactly what hurling is but have little interest in playing it is simply unthinkable- it's obviously just incompetence by the GAA to sell it to them."</div>I'm a big fan of Griffin. I cannot comprehend how anybody could not love hurling. It is far beyond sport.
Comparing hurling to sport is like comparing the Atlantic Ocean to a pothole after it rains."
Replying To Goreylad1985: "Agree 1million percent with your last paragraph.
To give a perfect example, I have a 1st cousin from Thurles in Tipperary. (My aunt married a Tipp man and moved there!)
My cousin married a Donegal woman and moved up to her home place and are settled there. Football only club.
Few years back he made the drive to start the hurling with the underage academy. Got the green light from the club executive, got the resources and funding sorted himself for hurleys / helmets. Basically himself and another father from Offaly doing the whole lot.
There was a bit of buy in at the start but it just fell to the wayside after a while. Novelty for a few months but then the football coaches, parents and the club decided that that's enough of that craic now. Back to football.
My cousin put a lot of time and effort into this but as you said horse water drink.
They don't want the distraction of hurling. It's not on their radar.
You could bring Cian Lynch, Brian Hayes or even Jimmy Barry Murphy upto some clubs but you can't promote hurling to people who refuse to have it promoted to them"
Probably the only way your cousin and the lad from Offaly could've got over that opposition is start completely from scratch, even get into the local national school, and hope the kids would like it enough to demand their parents brought them. Its been done in other counties with help from Croke Park. But finding enough other parents to help out with all that, and finding a pitch to play on would be the big issue there if the local gfc were that opposed to hurling. And then finding opponents to play.