GAA chills out on ice baths

Found out last week on a break overseas that the world wide web, isn’t always as world wide as we think and I’m not just talking about trying to get broadband in parts of rural Ireland.
They say a week is a long time in politics but having surveyed the GAA scene on my return there’s been a lot happening here at home to whet the appetite for the impending championships.
But one item immediately caught my attention saying that the GAA could find no medical evidence to support the use of ice baths as a method of recovery.
Hurrah!
I was a fairly fit guy when I played Gaelic football at my peak but even then I resented the constant laps, sprints and all the other masochistic training methods, which were in vogue after Mick O’Dwyer trained his team for 27 nights in a row before winning the 1975 All Ireland.
I came from the school of thought which felt that while this was all fine and dandy that you still needed to catch the ball properly, kick with both feet and use your football brain to do some damage on the field.
The problem with training then however, was that you never saw a ball until the ref threw it in for the first game of the new season!
However, there was no shortage of sergeant major types whose mantra was fitness, fitness, fitness!
Often I was almost physically sick at some particularly masochistic session but my revenge was putting the ball in the back of the onion or splitting the defence with a pass the ‘race horses’ could only dream about.
I was delighted when finally coaching caught up in the 1990s and managers and mentors all over the country realised once again that fitness is only important if players have learned the basic skills and continued to practise them.
After all the reason we all played the game is we loved to kick the leather and if we could strike it longer or more accurately than some one else then it was even better!
So it was with a bit of shock and horror when I learned that county players all over the country were enduring ice baths in recent seasons directly after training ‘to aid their recovery’.
To be honest I wondered how any player needed an ice bath after training given how cold our climate is for eight months of the year in the first place.
Can’t you just picture our top footballers and hurlers on a winter’s night training in sub zero temperatures being told that there’s nothing like a good ice bath to aid your recovery!
There are some people who actually like that type of thing, after all every side has a sprinkling of sado masochists who wear hair shirts and a tank top in December.
But I was always convinced that the ice bath originated in the over active mind of a manager who was convinced that if the players had to endure them early in the championship that they would hate the opposition so much for their suffering that they would blow them away.
The good news is that the hated baths should now be gone but you have to wonder what they will come up with next!