Single win return on £100,000
expenditure
Over the past seven years London GAA has spent over £100,000
on away games in the NFL. DAVID THORPE asks is it money well spent?
 It
costs £5,000 for London GAA to field a team in the away rounds of
the National Football League.
That means that over the past seven years more than £100,000 has
been spent on the London footballers, a period which has yielded just
one victory — against Carlow in 2004 — and a series of heavy
defeats.
Those figures have prompted renewed calls among many in the London GAA
fraternity to scrap the costly League campaign (at least for a spell)
and reinvest the money elsewhere with the aim of developing young, locally-born
talent.
That cost is in addition to money spent on travelling to Ireland for challenge
games, and comes at a time when London GAA’s finances have been
in something of a parlous state.
London GAA chairman Larry O’Leary concedes that there had been some
disquiet in GAA circles about league participation.
He said: “There will be no change of policy, I feel that the expenditure
is worthwhile because to be frank if you don’t have a league you
don’t really have a championship as players will be going into championship
level football without good games under their belts.”
In the build-up to the league campaign the London panel spent a weekend
in Dublin, where they faced a Meath county side and Dublin senior club
Naomh Bearog, which they defeated.
London football manager Noel Dunning echoed O’Leary’s comments
regarding the importance of the National League to his teams preparations
for the championship.
He said: “London will always have a high turnover of players and
the only real chance I get to have a look at new players is via the league.
We put up a good performance against Roscommon in the championship last
year. We are up against teams like Donegal and Roscommon and if we want
to compete with them on the field we have to compete in every other way.
“I am on the finance committee and I feel that more fundraising
needs to be done if London are to progress in the way that I and the players
would like.”
London’s heaviest defeats
Roscommon 2-14 London 0-3
12/02/06 Dr. Hyde Park
London were completely outclassed by a Roscommon side who have been struggling
to make any impact on the national consciousness in recent years. All
of the Exiles scores came from Andy Gallagher. The Westerners didn’t
have to break beyond a canter to record this win with their goalkeeper
only touching the ball five times in the entire match.
A demoralising defeat given London’s excellent performance against
Roscommon in last year’s Championship.
London 1-5 Longford 1-16
5/02/06 Ruislip
An extremely weak Longford side featuring a clutch of U-21 and fringe
players along with just a handful of established names looked vulnerable
but in the end they made short work of a London side who failed to win
any single sector of the pitch.
An Andy Gallagher goal put some sort of respectability on the result for
the Exiles but being completely out played and out battled by a Longford
side which would fail to beat most inter county sides was a sign that
this could be a winter of discontent for London football.
Donegal 1-14 London 1-6
20/03/04 Ruislip:
The scoreline certainly flattered London as they never laid a glove on
a Donegal team who were far from full strength.
An early London goal seemed to set the Exiles up nicely but from that
moment on Donegal were dominant and by the final quarter they were almost
scoring at will. London’s league form in 2004 was quite respectable
but this result laid bare the many inadequacies which blight London’s
league form annually.
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