This year’s winter agenda items speak to more fundamental matters, striking right to the viscera of the two main codes. Specifically, the ongoing anxiety about the tedious tactics of most modern Gaelic football; and the controversial plan to grow hurling by kicking five counties out of the league.

To simplify, Gaelic football is a game loved by few but played by many, while hurling is a game loved by many but played by too few.

At first glance the two codes are dealing with very different issues, but there is a common thread. Underpinning this winter’s malaise is a desire that the games live up to their responsibilities to the GAA’s higher ideals, that sense of a shining city on the hill that is the association’s motivating force.

In football’s case, the wish is that the game’s protagonists would stop boring the arse out of us with negative tactics. Gaelic football is supposed to be an expression of the rugged Irish spirit, the mix of craft and brawn that built the skyscrapers and sent wild geese spreading their grey wing upon every tide. It’s supposed be a sinewy youth soaring through the sky, emerging through fists and elbows to seize the moment, besting his opposite number in a contest gladiatorial and fair, aside from the odd sly dig here or there.

A combination of sodden turf and cyclonic weather means the game rarely looks its best at this time of year, therefore dour club championship encounters can seem especially gruelly. The stakes are high and the temperatures are low, the muck and bullets are flying and there are no marks for artistic impression. Your instinct is to give the players credit rather than criticism for their labours, in the way you might praise ESB workers for fixing power lines during a storm.

Still, one tends to listen to Peter Canavan on pretty much anything to do with the big ball game and speaking on RTÉ during the recent Trillick vs Crossmaglen Rangers grindfest, the great man put aside his usual cool reserve having watched the once-imperious Armagh champions stumble through an entire half without scoring.

"I’m not one to be making rash statements but I think if we don't act now...” said an exasperated Canavan after Trillick’s 0-9 to 0-4 win. “We’ve had so many poor games at county level and at club level.

"I’m not blaming coaches for that. Their main job is the get the best out of players and to win. As a result of that, they can set it up and make the game as a spectacle appalling at times and it’s putting a lot of people off watching the game. Unfortunately, it may be putting some youngsters off playing the game as well and that’s something we don’t want to see."

Canavan expressed his hope that a recently appointed think tank featuring the likes of Michael Murphy, Pat Gilroy, Colm O’Rourke and others will come up with “meaningful rule changes” to save the game. Some reckon we should let the hare sit and accept that dull games are a feature of every field game at elite level. But the preponderance of them right now makes it feel like Gaelic football tactics have reached some sort of evolutionary dead end.

All of which makes hurling’s big winter dilemma even more puzzling for small ball enthusiasts. How, given its evident beauty and spectacle, which even the modern predilection for risk evasion has been unable to kill, are there vast tracts of the land which have refused to fall under its spell?

The hostile reaction to the proposal to axe Leitrim, Louth, Cavan, Fermanagh and Longford from the hurling league and spend the money saved on grassroots hurling projects in the counties has been such that it is surely dead in the water.

Many and detailed have been the stories of selfless dedication of players and coaches, for whom their humble county team is a beacon in a hurling wilderness. Kicking them out of the league to save a few shekels for vague, unspecified plans to grow the game has been portrayed as the GAA version of chopping down a chunk of the Amazon rainforest.

And yet the row has focused minds on the GAA’s secret shame: the failure, to borrow Liam Griffin’s phrase, to put a hurl in the hand of every Irish child. Like football’s accommodation with stultifying pragmatism, hurling has accepted being a national game with a regional reality. The GAA’s compromise to their ideals is to promote the ancient art to all, unless they’d rather play football, in which case, it’s grand, we’ll say nothing.

As I write, the manager of the Leitrim hurlers has published his objection to figures provided by the county treasurer in support of the controversial motion, which paint the picture of a small county stretched to the limit.

The manager, Olcan Conway, says that the senior hurling team received only 0.8% of the proceeds of Leitrim supporters’ main fundraising event and suggests the costs for the team quoted by the treasurer have been inflated to paint a harsher picture. The sense is that Leitrim GAA are saying they have enough to be worrying about without keeping a hurling team on the road.

Put together, the two codes’ problems du jour come from the familiar clash of GAA idealism with lived reality, those Gordian knots that form when the association’s lofty aspirations meet the awkward terrain of human nature. They tend to take longer than even the longest winter to sort out.