It was a short statement and not unexpected but it did confirm the fears that the Coronavirus impact on sport was going to extend well into the summer.
“The GAA have confirmed that due to the current uncertainty created by the Covid 19 pandemic, the Connacht Senior Football Championship meeting between New York and Galway, scheduled to take place in Gaelic Park, New York on May 3rd, has been postponed.”
“The future for this fixture will be considered at a later date and in the context of the anticipated overall re-drawing of the national fixtures calendar for 2020 as necessitated by the ongoing disruption to the GAA games programme.”
That re-drawing of the schedule is likely to have to incorporate a number of movable start and finish dates for the core competitions.
It was a fiendishly difficult challenge when there were 52 weeks to play with. we wrote at the time that it would have been so much easier if there were just an extra two weeks.
Now we will have four, eight, twelve or more weeks less.
There will be changes necessary but it will be possible. It has to be. We have to plan that this will pass and that something close to what we have accepted as normal will return.
They say that many minds coming together can be smarter than one. We will be taking a look over the coming days at a number of different scenarios that might help to unpick the knot.
Image credit: Sam Barnes, Sportsfile / AIB GAA
