Hurling can take lead and show football way forward
The other month inter-county football managers were each sent an 80-page document from Croke Park detailing all the proposals that various individual county boards issued for altering the football championship structure. One manager I spoke to was baffled more than he was overwhelmed by the deluge of paper. Did they really expect an inter-county manager to have the time to wade through all 80 pages?
As it turns out, he’s been spared the effort. After all those ideas, after all that paperwork, the provincial championships will remain intact. Within administrative circles there’s no appetite for an intermediate championship even though every county runs a similar competition of its own. There could be a tweak to the qualifiers but that’ll be about it. The status quo will remain pretty much intact.
And so the Clares and Limericks will continue to be imprisoned by Kerry. Out west, Leitrim footballers will be told to hang on to the example of ’94, as if a Mayo side with Cillian O’Connor — still only 23 — are ever going to allow that happen again. And up North, they’ll again pride themselves through the early summer on how competitive Ulster is and then bemoan when their provincial runners up are steamrolled by a fresher, stronger side.
Tadhg Kennelly for one will have been disappointed by the quelling of any true change. When he was in town last month for the International Rules, he convincingly argued why all teams — including the so-called weaker ones — needed more championship games, why the sport needed more championship games.
But a conservative body, by nature anyway, the GAA and its traditionalist president was afraid of being seen to further elevate the county game from the club game, and thus baulked from the strong momentum and case there was for change this past summer.
Yet just as a window and opportunity for change has closed on football, one could be opening for hurling.
A new hurling development committee has been appointed, with Paudie O’Neill as its chairman.
It is an inspired appointment. O’Neill is well familiar with the challenges a lower or developing programme faces, through his experience of teaching in Dublin for over 30 years and his work in helping Ballyboden become a hurling stronghold.
Likewise the Clonmel native is highly au fait with the elite level of the game, having spent the past three seasons as coach to the Tipperary senior hurlers.
At a launch last week, O’Neill spoke about the appeal of having more regular championship games throughout the summer. In 2013, Tipp only played two championships games. In 2014, they had seven.
In 2015, they had only three again, even though they won Munster. Their reward for that was a five-week waiting period. The attraction of a round-robin style championship, as touted by the outgoing but largely-ignored development committee, was clear to O’Neill.
“In 2014, it was brilliant because you were getting games and there was a connection being built between the supporters and ourselves,” he’d say.
“Players and the public want more games at the right time of the year... [A] model of home and away, say Tipp v Clare in Semple Stadium and Cusack Park, people would love it.”
He’s right. In early March this year, O’Neill would have been on the line when those two counties met in the league in Ennis. A lively crowd of 7,500 filed into Cusack Park on a cold crisp day, only a couple of thousand fewer than made it to Clare’s opening Munster championship games in 2010 and 2012 against Waterford. And yet Eamon O’Shea made little of the significance of the game or the victory: “It was a league match. It says nothing about nothing.”
Davy Fitzgerald also questioned its relevance. “You could say they [league games] are big games, but in the context of May and June when we look back at it, how big are they?” It was hard to argue with them. When you’d even question the relevance of winning Munster in July, what was the value of a league game in March?
In the league, it’s too much neither one thing nor the other.
Just like in football, hurling has too many games in the spring and not enough in the summer. That should change. And the beauty of it is, it doesn’t have to be at the cost of the clubs.
Unlike football which is still a four-province sport, hurling should be less bound by tradition. There’s no Connacht championship, no Ulster championship; between this year and next year, the Leinster championship will have accommodated teams from four different provinces. The only sacred cow is the Munster championship — and as this column has frequently illustrated through the years, winning that competition has become a burden that disadvantages its champion in the All-Ireland semi-final.
It certainly shouldn’t feel obliged to maintaining the league. Scrapping it would free up so much space in the calendar.
Say you were to only start competitive inter-county hurling in April, with possibly some version of a provincial championship. The championship itself starts proper in early May. Where teams are guaranteed at least seven games.
You could still have plenty of club games — championship or otherwise — running through the summer.
Say Weeks 1, 2, and 3 (the first three weeks of May) are assigned to county hurling. Then weeks 4 and 5 are allotted to the club. The GAA will still have big games on the shop window and television in those weeks as there’ll be football games.
In weeks 6 and 7, one pool could resume having county games, while the other group continues with club games, and then in weeks 8 and 9, it alternates.
Everyone would win this way. Patrick Horgan still gets to play with Glen Rovers regularly in the summer months. He still gets to play a lot for Cork — on TV (with the fixtures known in advance, Friday Night Live v Limerick opens up).
The clubs would have the players all to themselves by late August or early September for the knockout stages of the local championships. Munster Council might worry about its coffers but this system would generate even more money which Munster Council could still help distribute.
And there’d be another benefit. In explaining why he wanted football’s competitive structures changed, Kennelly argued, “You’re competing against the Premier League and the Rugby World Cup in terms of marketing, and it’s being taken away from us.”
Maybe football would wake up when hurling would really show it up.
