Roscommon U-20 football manager, Cian Smith, has blasted the scheduling of Wednesday evening\u2019s All-Ireland U-20 football semi-final against Kerry.<\/p>\n
The game at FBD Semple Stadium, which attracted an attendance of just 1,437, got underway at 7.30 p.m. and went to extra-time, meaning that players and supporters from both counties didn\u2019t arrive home until well after midnight.<\/p>\n
Smith revealed that two players on the Roscommon panel couldn\u2019t tog out because of college exams, and went on to question the GAA\u2019s promotion of such an important grade \u2014 suggesting that senior players who are eligible for U-20 teams would have plenty of years in their careers to play senior championship football.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s a bigger picture, and I was going to say this whether we won or lost this evening. It\u2019s great to play in an All-Ireland semi-final \u2014 great pitch, great venue \u2014 but, personally, I think it\u2019s absolutely disgraceful that it\u2019s on a Wednesday night.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s absolutely crazy. This is supposed to be the second premier football competition after the senior championship. It\u2019s one thing playing in a Connacht championship round robin on a Wednesday night, I\u2019ve no problem with that.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“But to ask ourselves and Kerry to come down here on a Wednesday night, we had two guys today that couldn\u2019t tog out because of exams in college.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s scandalous \u2014 for players, supporters and management. At the end of the day, we\u2019re all volunteers. We all have day jobs, we have to take half days. We love doing it, but the GAA really needs to think about promoting this competition.<\/p>\n
“Obviously, the issue is senior players with U-20 squads. But at the end of the day, you\u2019re either a U-20 or a senior. You\u2019ll play senior for long enough.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Roscommon U-20 football manager, Cian Smith, has blasted the scheduling of Wednesday evening\u2019s All-Ireland U-20 football semi-final against…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":448349,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,60,43],"class_list":["post-448348","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ireland","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/448348","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=448348"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/448348\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/448349"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=448348"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=448348"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=448348"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}