Paul Rouse: Why an All-Ireland B Football Championship is a deeply flawed concept

This championship has also served to do is to remind us of the beauty of a straight knockout competition

Fri, 13 Nov, 2020 - 06:05

Here are two things that are very hard to argue against:

1. There’s nothing quite like a knockout championship match;

2. The All-Ireland B Football Championship is a deeply flawed concept.

Let’s start with the second issue there — the All-Ireland B Football Championship, whose implementation was mercifully delayed this year because of Covid.

When it was announced as the GAA’s new ‘two-tiered’ panacea to the playing of uncompetitive championship matches, it was repeatedly said that proper marketing would make a success of the concept.

This was lazy reasoning.

The problem with this lazy reasoning was compounded by the fact that the B All-Ireland was not part of a well-designed, strategic series of initiatives and policies to meet the challenges of improving football among those who do not enjoy success, or who are not currently competitive at All-Ireland level.

Instead — as it was designed — the B All-Ireland would surely only perpetuate the existing gap in an out-of-sight, out-of-mind way. Indeed, it will most likely worsen things in various instances.

Further, it was never even clear what exactly the planned B All-Ireland was intended to achieve.

Was it actually intended as a means to close the gap between the weakest teams and the strongest?

Logic

The logic of how that might work in practice was never set out. Nobody in a position of authority within the GAA sketched out a vision of what they envisaged inter-county Gaelic football should look like, let alone how we might get there.

Was the B All-Ireland a point of end, or was it a holding pattern?

The reality is, of course, that the introduction of a B championship is a structural lurch in the dark, one that cannot work in isolation.

This is not a new point, but it remains an inescapable one.

To be blunt about it, without a wider programme of reform of funding, coaching, and club development for individual counties, the B Championship will achieve nothing substantial. What it certainly cannot do is transform competitiveness.

Anybody who doubts that needs look no further than this year’s football championship.

Let’s remember that the essential divide between the All-Ireland championship and the B All-Ireland championship saw teams from Divisions 1 and 2 distinguished from those of Divisions 3 and 4, as manifest in the National Football League.

But that is not where the faultlines lie. This year’s Munster football final will be played out between two Division 3 teams — Cork and Tipperary. Cork beat a Division 1 team (the league champions, indeed) to reach the final, while Tipperary beat a Division 2 team. It was worth mentioning that Limerick — a Division 4 team — are exceptionally unlucky not to be in the final.

The Ulster final will also feature either a team that has just been promoted from Division 3 (Down, who beat a Division 2 team in the quarter-final) or one that has been relegated to Division 3 (Cavan).

Other matches between teams from Divisions 2 and 3 last weekend (Kildare v Offaly and Laois v Longford) were both won by the team from the higher division, but both could easily have gone the other way.

Meanwhile, games between teams from Divisions 1 and 2 have themselves been uncompetitive — the manner in which Dublin beat Westmeath is the great example.

It can be pointed out by way of counter-evidence that Division 1 team Meath hammered Division 4 team Wicklow and scored seven goals in the process. That’s undeniable. At the same time, however, Wicklow themselves scored seven goals in hammering fellow Division 4 team Antrim just a month ago.

Again, the basic point is, that what this championship has shown — yet again — is that the logic behind introducing a B All-Ireland in the manner which was agreed was flawed at the time and deeply flawed, as evidenced over the past two weekends.

What this championship has also served to do is to remind us of the beauty of a straight knockout competition.

The ferocity with which Tyrone and Donegal went about their Ulster football quarter-final was given an added spice by the fact that there was no backdoor, no safety net for the losers.

Similarly, the greatness of Cork’s victory over Kerry — the thing that made it special above everything else — is that Kerry are gone from the championship.

If Kerry had been able to rebuild through the qualifiers, there is no way the victory would have meant as much.

The fear would always — and immediately – have been made plain that there would be another day, and on that day Kerry would wreak vengeance.

Shadowboxing

Contrast all of this with the shadowboxing that characterised the early rounds of the hurling championship.

It is not to suggest that the hurling teams that lost set out to do so or that they did not badly want to win.

Of course, they wanted to win.

But there is a thing about knowing that there is a second chance that dulls the desperation upon which the very best and most intense of championship matches depends.

And it is only now — in the coming weekends — that we will truly see the hurling championship spark into life.

And, most of all, compare the rawness of a championship outing this year, with the tepid fare that characterizes too many matches in the Super 8s.

As with the opportunity that has now presented itself with the calendar of play, Covid has created the potential to look again at how the GAA plans to organise its football championship.

The GAA already has a tiered competition — it’s called the National Football League. This should be run off and then followed by a knockout championship. This championship should be open to every county who wishes to enter.

In the meantime, a proper concerted plan — with detailed financial, coaching, organisational, and other resourcing provisions — should be constructed and implemented to aid the development of football in every county in the country.

This plan should embrace the idea of spending caps in each county. It is one thing to have the resources of counties skewed by geography and demographics, it is much more destructive to competitiveness to allow such disparity between budgets.

In all of this, a revised calendar could condense the season and get rid of the sprawl of pre-season secondary competitions that prolong demands and drive costs even higher.

It would allow for the playing of meaningful club championships and give all players clarity on when they play, when they can work, when they can holiday, when they can rest.

The hope has to be that there is a rethink of championship structures to accompany the change in calendar.

In the meantime, there is a proper championship to enjoy — a championship that is a timely reminder that sometimes you can change things for the worse.

Paul Rouse is professor of history at University College Dublin and presenter of the Irish Examiner Gaelic Football Podcast.