Should the All-Ireland hurling final be moved to the last Sunday in August?

AS currently constituted, the All-Ireland senior hurling season is surely the most logically ill-contrived and the most knowingly ill-conceived of all major national sports.

Certainly I don’t know of any sport that follows the GAA hurling model, and some model it is.

It starts in January, from closed season straight into competitive action with the Walsh Cup and the Waterford Crystal senior hurling tournament, is then followed by the Allianz Hurling League which isn’t strictly a league but a league/championship, with a final play-off in late April and early May.

The championships then begin with preliminary rounds in Leinster which has more competing teams than Munster (another GAA anomaly, four quarters aren’t quarters at all, one province — Leinster — with twice the number of counties as two others, Munster and Connacht).

That’s the problem with trying to write a piece on the GAA hurling and footballga championships — so convoluted is the system that you keep on having to deviate, to bracket off a statement here and a fact there.

Anyway, where were we — oh yes, the start of the championships. May is a busy month in both Leinster and Munster, while up in Ulster, well, they’re doing their own thing, aren’t they? There is an Ulster senior hurling championship, but it doesn’t mean anything really, an annual parade for Antrim at this stage, who also happen to play in the Leinster championship. No matter, let’s not get side-tracked again on that one.

June is another busy month, even busier now that the All-Ireland qualifiers have begun. The qualifiers? We haven’t mentioned those?

The qualifiers were introduced as a kind of third championship, a means of giving those beaten in the straight knockout provincial champions a second chance, and it brings us up to All-Ireland quarter-final stage, where the two teams who emerge from those qualifiers get to meet the beaten provincial finalists.

All of this is done in timely fashion, qualifier games following on very quickly one after the other even as the provincial championships draw to their own conclusion.

Then it all begins to drag. There are only two All-Ireland quarter-finals (provincial winners go straight to semi-final stage), and both of those are held on the same weekend, usually on the same day and at the same venue.

This is where trouble really starts. Semi-finals are held on separate weekends, though both are in Croke Park.

Two weeks to the first semi-final, another week then to the second. Why not have both semi-finals on that first weekend? If there’s a problem with the possibility of Croke Park not being able to hold the crowd — and that wouldn’t have been the case this year — then one game could be played on the Saturday, one on the Sunday. That would be the first weekend in August.

The final could then be played two weeks later. At the moment it’s three weeks between the second semi-final and the final, four weeks for those who won the first semi-final — that’s too long. Too long for the competing teams, too long for media coverage. Two weeks is more than enough time for a build-up to a final.

All of that would save two weeks off the end of the inter-county season, two fine-weather weeks badly needed on the club scene. It could be done.