Kieran Shannon: Every game will matter when split season dream becomes reality
A bit like we were told at the start of the pandemic that the best way for the country to come together was by staying apart, it seems that Covid-19 has taught the GAA that it needs a split – or at least a split season – for everyone to come together.
There is now almost unanimous support for the idea of a separate county and club season, the unexpressed sentiment being that whatever profile the GAA will lose by dispensing with All Ireland inter-county semi-finals and finals in the traditional prime months of August and September will be more than compensated for by having the rest of the year free from the rancour and dissent of incessant claims that the club has been neglected.
In other words, if you were to view this strictly in PR terms, shifting the All-Ireland finals into July is actually a good move, not a regressive one, not least because it eradicates your most constant source of criticism and aggravation while satisfying the GAA’s most important public – its clubs.
And so, just like that, almost overnight, the GAA club player has gone from having probably the most infuriating and dissatisfying games programme in all of Irish sport to likely one of the most fulfilling. Pre-season beginning in April with spring and all its promise; league games and other matches throughout the summer while still allowing you to get in your two-week holiday and the younger lads travel for a bit longer whenever it’s safe to do so again; then county championship throughout two prime summer months when the ground is still firm.
For too long, too many club players have associated their participation in the sport with dark nights and muddy pitches, and the summer being neither one thing nor the other before your county men get back.
Suddenly a predominantly winter sport has become a summer one.
And, of course, what it also allows is for a steady of programme of games in that club championship. Mark Landers, who 21 years ago this week lifted the Liam MacCarthy Cup, pointed out last weekend that he has spent almost as many years advocating for a round-robin county championship format. Now that Cork finally has one, Landers has declared it a “remarkable” championship.
“That’s the beauty of the league-style scenario,” he’d say as part of the commentary team following UCC’s win over Imokilly at the weekend. “For the last 20 years I’ve been banging on about having this type of championship and all you kept getting back was ‘There will be dead rubbers.’ There is no dead rubber in any of the five divisions. At the top, middle, and bottom, everything is at stake.
The latter point in particular is a vital if obvious one. Players get better from playing regular, meaningful games. They can develop a rhythm. They and their coaches can atone for and learn from an early-round defeat and quickly correct it.
It was a dynamic that made the 2018 All-Ireland senior hurling championship the most compelling and satisfying in history, and makes Division Two of the national football league routinely the most fascinating league in spring-time GAA. Even in this highly-disrupted season, everything is still at stake, where a Laois could still end up top and promoted or at the bottom and relegated.
The question now would appear to be not whether there will or won’t be a split season but rather will it commence in 2021 or 2022 and what it might look like in either of those years.
President John Horan and others such as Feargal McGill, the GAA’s head of games administration, have pointed out how there will first of all need to be a Congress or a special Congress to ratify such a fundamental change, which will involve considerable logistical challenges in the current climate.
This time last year we were all gearing up for Dublin and Kerry meeting in the All-Ireland final. Under the old normal, we’d have been anticipating another final this weekend. But next year, what if Covid is contained? The idea of the 2021 All-Ireland football finalists only getting back to their own clubs in the second half of September doesn’t sit or fit with the new national mood.
If there is enough will as well as common sense, there should be a split season in place in 2021, with a national league starting in February and the All-Ireland finals completed by at least the middle of August, if not the end of July; it’s just a case of whether there should or shouldn’t still be a Super 8s and a Tailteann (All Ireland B) Cup in football.
What will be even more intriguing though is what the 2022 calendar and competition formats could and should look like.
Thankfully we should never again see national league games in either football but especially in hurling being played in January. That month and most of February should be freed up for third-level competition.
With less time and less weeks, the inter-county game has a choice to make. It cannot have a preseason provincial competition like the McGrath Cup, and a national league, and a provincial championship, and the Super 8s, and the rest of the All Ireland series. Some things have to go.
The pre-season provincial competitions are the most obvious that will make way, not least because in football the first competition proper could be the provincial championships played on a round-robin basis, taking the slot normally occupied by the national league.
It was one of the options proposed by the GAA’s Fixture Calendar Review Task Force when it reported last winter and in the new climate probably has the strongest claim. For one it would take up a weekend or two less than running the national league does. It would mean we’d still have provincial championships and winners and preserve the history of those competitions; Éamon O’Hara’s grandkids wouldn’t have to ask what was it he won in 2007.
Clare and Kildare would have more chance of winning a provincial title while the likes of Kerry and Dublin were still only cranking up. It would save those counties having to go up to Derry and Donegal in March. Instead they’d be playing local derbies in front of good crowds, with everyone scrambling to either make the provincial final or semi-final.
In acknowledging and protecting tradition though, the GAA and football cannot be a slave to it. And the simple truth is it cannot continue to devote a precious month like May to the provincial championships. Players and spectators in this day and age would prefer if May and most June were freed up for round-robin championship games where teams are playing sides from outside their own province. Then have your All-Ireland quarter-finals, semi-finals and finals.
Those various proposals from the fixtures taskforce need to be studied and assessed again now, just as those the GPA are due to unveil soon, but new ones should also be welcomed given there will now be a split season and a condensed inter-county season.
But either way. every county team should have what every club in Cork now has – a series of meaningful, round-robin championship games that will bring them on.
Hurling also needs some re-examination. The current provincial round-robin championship works brilliantly but the national league has lost some its lustre. Should it be retained in its current form as essentially a warm-up competition? Should hurling become just one competition, starting on St Patrick’s Day, where every county in the Liam MacCarthy Cup plays every county, cross-conference style, even though it will again be the top three in each province that qualifies for the All-Ireland series and you would still have provincial finals?
Big questions but exciting ones. From a crisis has come an opportunity to have not just a better programme games for the club player but also for the county one.
