Roscommon star Conor Cox reckons the rules should be ‘relaxed’ to make it easier for players like him to transfer to counties where they’re wanted.
Cox’s native Kerry play Dublin at Croke Park in an League opener tomorrow evening – four years after the Listowel man featured in the exact same fixture.
He made seven league appearances in total for Kerry and won three All-Ireland junior titles between 2012 and 2017, racking up 4-64 at that level.
But it wasn’t enough to convince Kingdom boss Eamonn Fitzmaurice of his talent and Cox opted to switch to Roscommon, the county of his father, for the 2019 campaign.
It worked out well and he was nominated for an All-Star after picking up a Connacht medal but the transfer took months to go through.
The 26-year-old Carrick-on-Shannon based forward said: “I didn’t understand the situation, I suppose I didn’t do enough research in the first place to know anything about transfers. I just thought that it was a matter of moving because I did have a parent up there.
“But there seemed to be other blockages along the way.
“The way society is these days, people moving to different parts of the country for work, maybe the GAA should possibly look into something like that (making transfers simpler).
“Dublin would be a big one. I suppose Cork would be another one. Galway have a number of players, even the club scene in Kerry is very, very busy.
“It’s definitely something that maybe if people did have aspirations to play inter-county with another county, and it suited them work-wise and living-wise, definitely it’s something that could be looked into by the GAA to maybe make things a small bit easier.
“Initially I completed a club transfer from Listowel to Eire Og in Roscommon but then if I was playing with Eire Og I couldn’t have played with Roscommon until I made an appearance in the club championship. Unfortunately that wasn’t until August so clearly the management would have wanted to have a look at me earlier than that.
“Then I’d have transferred back down to Listowel and represented Roscommon under the parent rule so I suppose just small things like that. In my opinion, common sense should have prevailed there because it’s not like I was trying to do anything major (wrong).
“I suppose the GAA have their reasons for all of this and maybe there are things that we don’t know about that the rules are there for.”
Roscommon begin their Division 2 campaign at home to Laois on Sunday knowing any slip ups could leave them in a potential battle to avoid Tier 2 championship football.
Cox said: “If you drop down to Division 3 you have that second tier coming in this year so I think that’ll be in every team’s thoughts, in Division 2 and Division 3. That’ll be their objective first of all, to ensure that they’re playing at the top tier, definitely.”
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