LAST UPDATE | 11 Mar 2020

JOHN O’MAHONY, the former Mayo and Galway football manager, believes the GAA will be “praying” they can get the National Leagues finished without disruption as the number of confirmed coronavirus cases in Ireland continues to rise.

A number of sporting fixtures across Europe have been affected as governments and sporting bodies try to limit the spread of Covid-19.

On Tuesday it was confirmed that Ireland’s Euro 2020 play-off against Slovakia on 26 March will be played behind closed doors in Bratislava. The Ireland rugby team have also had two Six Nations games postponed, while all sporting activity in Italy – the worst hit European country – has been suspended until 3 April.

There have been no postponements in the GAA calendar so far, but O’Mahony, a Fine Gael Senator, would not be surprised to see some National League games played behind closed doors in the coming weeks, with the option of postponements potentially leading to a packed fixture schedule further down the line. 

“I think what the GAA are hoping, I presume, is that they’d get the league out of the way,” O’Mahony said.

“I can’t see this weekend’s games being affected but then we don’t know. I’d say the worst case scenario is that you could envisage games behind played behind closed doors to get the competition finished because you have to [take precautions]… And you see at club level, it’s a lower level, it’s not a mass gathering as such so you’d imagine that, you know, the month of April is designated for club activity or however much club activity can go on, so I’d say the next two weeks are crucial and the GAA will be hoping and praying that they can get their competitions run off.”

While the GAA have yet to enforce any postponements or restrictions, O’Mahony has warned that the situation can change quickly, particularly in light of comments made by Taoiseach Leo Varadkar on Monday. 

Speaking at the unveiling of a €430million financial aid package, the Taoiseach warned that we could “easily” see half the Irish population contract the virus.

“The goalposts move very quickly,” O’Mahony continued.

“I mean last Friday… Italy seems to have been the tipping point, maybe the fact that they didn’t deal with it quick enough and then the rush came on. I have a feeling that… I have no insight into what the Taoiseach or the cabinet did after it [Monday's announcement] but I think it shocked everyone into real worry about it. Hopefully that might be the worst news and it might be contained and then in a few weeks’ time the whole thing might lift. But there is definitely a cloud over everyone at the minute.”

With the government deciding to cancel this year’s St Patrick’s Day festival, it is believed the GAA’s fixtures committee have already organised an alternative plan for the weeks ahead and are monitoring the situation closely.

“I think it’s when the emergency started being signalled from Italy that it forced the rest of Europe to think and we needed to take control of it and I think that’s what was done [on Monday],” O’Mahony added.

“Hopefully it won’t be the worst case scenario as predicted because if it is, you can forget about sporting activity. It’d be the least [important] thing on people’s minds but hopefully it won’t come to that.”

O’Mahony has some experience in the area having won the second of his two All-Ireland titles as manager of the Galway footballers in 2001, the year Foot and Mouth disease hit Ireland.

While the All-Ireland Championships were largely unaffected, bar the London footballers deciding not to field a team, the National Leagues and club calendars were heavily disrupted.

O'Mahony during his time as Galway manager in 2001. INPHO INPHO

There was a four-week postponement of inter-county and club matches, while the Tyrone footballers were pulled from the league following an outbreak of foot and mouth on a farm in Ardboe. 

With Tyrone out of the picture, four Connacht counties advanced to the semi-finals before Mayo pipped Galway on a score of 0-13 to 0-12 before a crowd of just 22,500 in the final at Croke Park.

“Because it [Foot and Mouth] was in Tyrone, there were four Connacht teams in the semi-finals, it was unique in that sense, it was Roscommon, Sligo, Mayo and Galway,” O’Mahony said.

“So it was very kind of, it made a low-key competition out of it. The final I remember was played out here [in Croke Park]. We were all kind of living in suspended animation like we are now and wondering was it going to go ahead at all. Tyrone couldn’t travel or couldn’t play or whatever because obviously there were cases in the north.

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“My memory of it was that there wasn’t as much panic as there is now, just as we’re speaking about the weekend and the next few weeks, but it did, you had all the precautions, we had the mats and stuff for the players, coming into training and all of that.

“You got the sense that the competition wasn’t as important because you had teams excluded from it.”

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