WE are not the AFL and they are not the GAA. Occasionally, we break bread over the same table. Then, when we’re not looking, they come in and poach the best salmon from our rivers.
Yet we know them better than any other sport outside the English Premier League. We’ve given so much of our own, somewhat grudgingly, since Sean Wight and Jim Stynes blazed a trail in the late ‘80s.
Conor McKenna is arguably the highest profile of the 13 current Irishmen in the men’s game, never more so than over the past few days.
Having initially tested positive for covid-19 on Friday, he was subjected to widespread vilification in Australia.
The AFL might learn themselves that naming players at a preliminary stage in such investigations is grossly unfair.
On Tuesday morning, it was confirmed that a follow-up test had come back negative.
Prior to McKenna’s positive test, the AFL had conducted 13,000 tests on players.
After it, he and team-mate James Stewart were sent into 14-day quarantines and the AFL banned all clubs from contact training, which had been phased back in as the country recovered from lockdown.
Australia’s record against covid-19 has been, alongside neighbours New Zealand, one of the best in the world.
In a country of 25 million people, just 102 related deaths have been recorded in Australia during the pandemic, with just under 7,000 cases in total.
In contrast, 546 people have died in Northern Ireland alone, with a further 1,720 having passed away in the Republic. The shameful record of our neighbours on either side of us remains a significant threat to Ireland’s recovery as an island.
While Nicholas Walsh doesn’t feel the AFL has moved too soon in restarting games, there is not wholehearted support for the return to play in Australia.
A spike in Victoria has seen 83 per cent of the whole country’s total of 116 new cases in the last week recorded in the state.
Each of the six mainland states have governed by their own varying restrictions
For instance, while Victoria had been allowing travel in and out of the state, Western Australia still has a firm lockdown on travel in or out of the state.
Yet at the weekend, the WA government announced that 30,000 people would be allowed to attend an AFL game from this weekend, with hopes that 60,000 will be allowed in by July 18.
That compares to just 250 spectators allowed at games in New South Wales, or 2,000 in Queensland and South Australia, where travel restrictions in and out of the state are still in place.
Western Australia also won’t yet allow anyone in or out of the state to play against either of their AFL clubs, West Coast Eagles or Fremantle, unless they self-quarantine for two weeks. But they’ll allow 30,000 of their own people in to watch a game that nobody can travel in to play.
Indeed, both the Eagles and Fremantle have had to move out of home and are currently based in a hub on the Gold Coast, where they’ve endured difficulties.
West Coast supremo Adam Simpson came out last week and announced that his team were going home after round four, no matter what the upshot of that is.
The AFL’s games may have restarted but they have made the leap without society being fully re-opened yet.
They’ve been given the green light partly because they signed up to the strict protocols, including the testing regime, imposed on players.
Prior to McKenna’s ‘positive’ test, they had been able to live their lives under the same rules as the rest of the population, while being subject to mandatory testing three times a week.
Training is still very much restricted. They had been allowed a return to contact training but only in groups of up to nine players accompanied by one coach.
Where AFL clubs would normally have had full group training sessions three times a week, they were allowed just one main training session now.
On the back of McKenna’s positive test outcome, they updated their guidance to say that contact training would not be permitted for the foreseeable future, but that games would continue.
They also issued advice that clubs should split their training groups up by the area of the pitch they play in so that if someone contracted the virus, it wouldn’t potentially wipe out his entire area of the team.
It also issued new guidelines this week that would bar players from having family players visit them for effectively four days before a game.
This was all off the back of a positive test on which doubt has now been cast, so it remains to be seen whether they will remain on the side of caution or make a swift return to their pre-existing protocols.
Having been out of commission since the tail end of March, the loss of revenues were set to completely devastate the sport’s future until the Australian federal government handed the organisation a $1billion bailout to keep the professional game alive.
It will only offset the damage for so long. Nicholas Walsh is one of the very lucky 20 per cent of employees within the AFL sphere (players aside) who has been able to keep his job.
“I’ve been very lucky. 80 per cent of people have been stood down until at least September, and a lot of them may not have a job to come back to. That’s the big hit.”
It’s expected that clubs will have to permanently cull their football departments, which basically oversee all strands of coaching from football coaches to strength and conditioning to dietitians.
Half the staff in the football department have already been laid off temporarily, although the Australian government currently has a similar furloughing scheme to the UK.
Budgets for the football department are currently capped at $11m per year, but Walsh expects that it will drop to around $7.5m from next season.
“A lot of people will lose their jobs and essentially, it will go back to an old way of coaching,” believes the former Cavan star.
The sustainability of the entire operation is in question. Negotiations have been in play between the players’ association and the AFL, with player payments likely to be cut by 10 to 15 per cent in lieu of a shorter season.
As a professional body, the AFL has always had to run a fairly tight ship. It is an indigenous game, same as ours, and so will only ever appeal beneath so many chimney pots.
There’s a lesson there for those who think the GAA could ever go professional.
And despite Australia’s brilliant record against covid-19, the AFL still is not out of the woods yet in terms of return-to-play.
