KILLINAN END - GAA clubs and county can learn from Japanese rise

KILLINAN END

 

Japan’s win over Ireland in the Rugby World Cup raises questions which have no easy answers about competitiveness and its nature.

There is a share of navel-gazing within the GAA on that very topic at the moment as the possible era of a second tier and maybe more in the football championship raises its head. Much of this rests on Dublin’s recent dominance and the apparent inevitability that the winners of competitions will come from an increasingly more elite group. Is this inevitable in the week that Japan knocked the team ranked at World number one backwards? In a week when Kiladangan won a fourth North Senior title in less than a decade having been outside the Senior winners’ enclosure for more than half a century before that?

An early memory is a vivid colour picture in the Guinness Book of Records of a Wales-Japan rugby international (from 1975 as it happens) played in the Land of the Rising Sun. The score was 82-6 to the Welsh who had an exceptional team at that time. Even allowing for that it was and indeed still is a monstrous score. So blasé were the Welsh about the whole thing they did not award caps for the match, the view being that if you were to lay claim to the famous red jersey you would do strictly on merit and not against a team even middle-of-the-road Welsh club teams would have put to the sword. In just a few decades Japan has jumped from that level to the point where for the second successive World Cup they have taken one of the big historical scalps of rugby’s original countries.

Could a GAA county do likewise? Feats akin to this have occurred in the past.

 

 

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