Brian Cody insists many club hurlers remain ‘very, very unhappy’ with the present scheduling of their games.
The 11-time All-Ireland winning Kilkenny boss said his main focus is on the county team but admitted he feels so sorry for club players.
He claimed they’re getting a ‘hard time’ with long gaps between games and said they’re essentially being told by officials ‘we’ll let you know when you’ll play again’.
His comments come in the wake of the recommendations of the Fixture Calendar Review task force which were published on Wednesday.
The committee produced three options for football championship reform though also presented a number of proposals regarding hurling.
It remains to be seen which are taken on and written into rule though a clearly frustrated Cody said something has to be done.
Asked if he can envisage a better situation that suits everyone, Cody said: “I think we have to. Can I envisage it? I hope so. Look, everybody knows my opinion on the whole situation at this stage.
“I think the club scene has been really getting a hard time. You play in April and then it’s, ‘We’ll let you know when you’ll play again’ sort of stuff, ‘It could be August, whatever, we’ll see, could be September’. It’s not the best situation for the clubs at all and I know a lot of club players are very, very unhappy with it. The balance is not right, it’s just not right.”
The Club Players Association had representation on the fixtures committee but withdrew at the 11th hour in protest.
They claimed they were ignored and that their proposals for structural reform of the football championship were ignored.
Cody said: “Obviously things aren’t great at the moment either with communication, with representatives of the clubs pulling out of the task force thing that was going on there, at the end of those discussions. I’m not exactly sure what was happening but there does need to be a meeting of minds on it.”
The April club window allows counties to stage games in this period and Kilkenny also took advantage of a break in the inter-county calendar during the Leinster championship for matches.
But Cody said: “You’re still waiting four or five months for the next game, trying to do something (training wise), whatever you could. That’s not a solution. The balance is not right, like I said. It’s difficult and I don’t have the solution for it but I would love to see something more positive happening.”
The fixtures committee recommended that the Hurling Development Committee look into a potential expansion of the Munster and Leinster groups from five to six teams each.
Cody said: “Look, I don’t know, I don’t think you can look at it in isolation. You can’t just look at the inter-county scene without looking at the club scene and the college scene and all the scenes that are there. There’s a glut of fixtures for a number of players and the players that are being squeezed are the club players.”
- Brian Cody was speaking at the official announcement of UPMC’s 10-year naming rights partnership with Kilkenny GAA that sees the home of Kilkenny GAA renamed UPMC Nowlan Park.
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