Gaelic football to be showcased at Emirates Dubai 7s 

By John Harrington

The profile of Gaelic games in the Middle East will receive a massive boost later this year when Gaelic football is showcased at the Emirates Dubai 7s festival which runs from Friday November 27 to Sunday November 29.

The first tournament in the annual World Rugby Sevens Series has a huge cachet as the longest running sports event in the Middle East.

Over the course of the weekend on a pitch beside the 50,000 capacity Sevens Stadium, thousands of people will get their first ever experience of Gaelic games with both Gaelic football and LGFA seven-a-side tournaments taking place.

Middle East GAA Chairperson, James O’Connell, believes it’ll be a fantastic opportunity to introduce Gaelic games to a completely new audience.

“It gets eyeballs on us from a different community,” says O’Connell. “We'd have a very strong Irish community here, and that Irish community would be 98% of the player base for our games.

“It's all Irish people essentially going to our games and our tournaments, whereas this is a huge opportunity to get different communities interested in our games.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if the vast majority of people at the festival weekend will be seeing Gaelic games for the very first time so it's brilliant.

“I suppose our initial mission here was to make sure our Irish players had a place to go and play when they came out to the Middle East.

“The GAA now wants to expand that into different cultures, different nationalities, and that's what we're trying to do here. We see this as very strategic in getting other eyeballs on our sport. The Dubai 7s could be huge for us.”

This exposure to a new audience comes at a good time for Gaelic games in the Middle East.

Since Cork native O’Connell moved to Dubai 11 years ago, he’s witnessed at first hand a huge increase in both the numbers playing and the standard of competition.

“We've gone from 14 to 16 clubs in that 10 years, but the real explosion has been the amount of teams within each club,” he says.

“When I got out here you would comfortably run a full tournament in three quarters of a day.

“You'd start at eight o'clock or nine o'clock in the morning, you'll be done by three or four o'clock. We now have to split the tournament into two days, because it's just gone so big.

“You would have been talking in the region of maybe 70 teams before, now we're at about 120 teams that would be competing. In any one tournament there could be 190 games over a weekend.

“It's a huge blitz type format where our halves are seven minutes a side and there's nine on the pitch at one time, with squads of 12.

“So, it's very, very fast, it's very quick, but with the heat and everything that goes on here, those 14-minute games, they do test the players.

“The quality of competition is very high. The vast majority of our senior men and women would have played inter-county at some stage back home so it’s a very good standard.”

Anyone experiencing Gaelic football for the first time at the Dubai 7s will likely be impressed by what they see because Middle East GAA have successfully adapted their playing rules to make it an even more attacking and high-octane sport.

“What we were finding with a seven-minute half was that if a team went a couple of points up they would hold on to the ball inside their own half and it wasn't making it a good spectacle so we introduced rules that you now have only 30 seconds to get out of your own half," says O'Connell.

“Once you get out of your half, you can then play away as normal in the opposition's half but at least you're higher up the pitch.

“The other rule we introduced is that once you go over halfway the ball cannot come backwards into your own half again.

“It has changed our game as a product and not just from a spectator point of view. The players have also found it makes it a far more enjoyable game to play.”

Non-Irish in the Middle East who might have an interest in joining a GAA club will surely be further encouraged by the fact that youth participation in Gaelic games has gone from strength to strength in recent years.

GAA clubs are now increasingly social and sporting outlets for families rather than just adults.

“The Middle East has changed,” says O’Connell. “Before most of our members would be very, very transient.

“The people who’d come would be predominantly teachers who were passing through going to Australia, or maybe just getting a few years’ experience. They'd do two, three years, and then they'd move away again.

“What we're finding is people are now starting to stay, people are buying houses, they're having families, so the whole juvenile section within the Middle East is exploding.

“The Dubai Éire Og club here in Dubai has gone to about 190 playing members, both hurling and football, male and female, we're all one club model here in the Middle East.

“Other areas have exploded as well. Qatar would be a very large juvenile club with again over 100 kids playing on a Friday or Saturday morning.

“Abu Dhabi have a huge juvenile section again, over 100 kids there on a Saturday morning playing hurling and football, girls and boys.

“And Saudi Arabia has now emerged as a very large population of juveniles there over the last two, three years, which is very interesting, and they're doing a great job there.

“They have over 100 kids now on a Friday morning playing hurling and football in Riyadh, which is phenomenal.”

One of the reasons that the GAA in the Middle East is in such a healthy state is because it provides a real sense of community as well as a sporting outlet. That was most apparent earlier this year when the Iran war broke out.

“When it all kicked off here in February we actually had a tournament that day, the day that it all started, and so many of our members were all at the tournament,” says O’Connell.

“There's kind of safety in numbers, be it in person or just as a community, and that was very evident. A lot of people, especially some of the teachers, would be living on their own. They'd have one-bed apartments and you can feel isolated, but Gaelic games provides a community.

“They had someone that could pick up the phone to meet for coffee or whatever, because we weren't isolated. You could move out of your houses and stuff when everything was happening, but it wasn't ideal. It was frightening.

“There were missiles being launched at all the Middle East regions. But when you had somewhere to be or somewhere to go or somewhere to call, it just made it that much easier.

“Everybody rallied together. We felt safe and we kind of felt together, which was great.”