How some of these aren’t banned in Gaelic football and hurling team practise sessions already is beyond us.
New Bolton manager Neil Lennon instantly made his mark this week by immediately banning his players from wearing hats at training, despite Lennon himself wearing a hat in the first session he took with the Bolton players.
Neil’s laying down of the law got us thinking a little closer to home and about the things that GAA managers should ban from training sessions up and down the country.
Considering that inter-county training sessions in both codes are practically professional these days, the suggestions below are more applicable to club training, which practically anyone with a sporting background in this country will have at least some experience of.
Some suggestions will no doubt be welcomed by the GAA community, others are likely to cause a bit of a ruckus, but the list in general should at least create debate and that’s always to be welcomed, particularly at a time of year when the GAA world is a little quieter than usual.
Feel free to add your own suggestions at the bottom of the page.
Wearing normal white socks over regular football socks
We’re not crazy on players doing this in actual matches but in training it should be a certified no-go. Those who observe the practice will claim that they do it for comfort as much as anything else but that is a bare-faced lie and they know it; it’s vanity and nothing more (you don’t see Kildare players wearing normal white socks over their white football socks).
Bryan Sheehan: Guilty
Mammies up and down the country rage at finding a gearbag full of coloured items and just one pair of filthy white socks and for their sake as much as anyone else, this trend needs to stop immediately.
Lengthy managerial team talks in bad weather
It can be hard enough to get lads to attend training when the weather’s a bit sh*t so the last thing they need is to be freezing when trudging out of the dressing room and then have to listen to their manager discuss the defeat at the weekend with the rain beating down on their backs.
Unless it’s a necessary explanation of a new training drill, all managerial team-talks during sh*te weather should be restricted to the dressing room… or as a threatened punishment if the performance level drops during the session.
Lads training with no tops on in warm weather
Conversely, when the weather’s warm, GAA players can’t spend enough time out in the open, particularly when there are farmer’s tans to show off.
While wearing just a bib is acceptable, at no stage should a player be allowed participate in a training session while topless; as if the prospect of bumping into a teammate’s sweaty torso isn’t bad enough, there are health and personal hygiene issues at stake here.
Wearing a bib, ala Eamon McGee, is fine. Anything less is a no-no
Removal of training tops should wait until a player undergoes the highly unnecessary but still pretty common ritual in GAA circles of taking one’s top off while walking the 30 or 40 yards from pitch to dressing room, a ritual practised by an increased number of participants when there are female parents watching their children in an underage match on an adjoining pitch on the same evening.
Cutting off or taping shirt sleeves to show off the guns
We’re going back to the vanity issue here. In an age where strength and conditioning is king, loads of GAA players, even at club level, possess ripped physiques and guns that would make a rugby player blush. And boy do they love to show them off.
Anyone who shows up in a Trevor Giles circa 1999 style get-up should be sent home immediately
The skin-tight jerseys of the like that Kildare and Armagh have worn in recent years are just about acceptable, but if a player turns up in a jersey with the sleeves taped to his arms or folded up to reveal as much of Dan and Ger as possible then he should be sent home immediately. You’re there to work, you’re not at a gun show.
Smelly gearbags
This might sound like an obvious one, but there’s always one lad in the dressing room who’ll turn up to training on a Friday having left his damp gear rotting in his gearbag since Tuesday and who’ll unleash a scent on the dressing room not unlike Sex Panther by Odeon in Anchorman. Worse still, you’ll probably end up sitting next to this guy and be forced to borrow one of the two pairs of extremely smelly socks in his bag once you’ve realised you’ve forgot your own. Nightmare.
The guy who fakes an injury to drop out of a run and then returns as a new man minutes later
There are few people more despised at a GAA training session than this guy. Say, for example, the manager decides to punish a team with five collective post-to-post runs during a session.
This guy will coast through two of them towards the back, drop out of the third clutching his leg and claiming a tight hamstring, sit out the fourth entirely and then return fresh for the fifth and final run, comfortably beating all of his team-mates who have bust a gut in the four previous runs and winning the plaudits of the management team who have asked for ‘one big push’ in the last run of the exercise.
Five extra individual post-to-posts and 500 push-ups wouldn’t be punishment enough for this guy.
The guy who busts a gut in a collective run but goes a little bit too hard
While GAA players resent the guy who doesn’t try hard enough, there’s also a bit of lingering resentment for the guy who tries a bit too hard and makes everyone else look bad.
The Kilkenny hurlers maintaining a textbook distance between each other during a training session at Nowlan Park in 2011. Nobody getting ahead of themselves here
This tends to happen when all the players are running together, waiting for commands from the management to speed up or slow down. Phrases like “You call that a f**ing jog?” are generally shouted in this guy’s direction, but often he’s too far ahead of the rest of the group to notice.
Driving a distance of less than 200 metres to training
Even though laziness is not a trait associated with the majority of GAA players, some can be incredibly lazy when it comes to matters off the pitch. One such way this manifests itself is the refusal of some players to expend any effort in the process of getting to training, no matter how close they happen to live to the pitch.
Numerous clubs throughout the country will have at least one player who could live within a stone’s throw of the grounds and still insist on hopping into the car to get there, even if it’s 25 degrees in the middle of July.
It’s worse again if the lad in question doesn’t own a car and instead stands outside waiting for his one of team-mates to stop and give him a lift; traditionally this guy is also one of the last out on the pitch due to his reluctance to leave the house before the end of Home and Away.
