Paul Rouse: Structural change without vision is going to end in tiers

In the last two years alone, Kerry and Dublin have given serious beatings to teams who are undeniably in the top 16 teams in the country. No redrawing of championship structures is going to change that

RTÉ commentator Marty Morrissey during the Connacht SFC match between Leitrim and Mayo in Castlebar last week. The 5-20 to 0-11 result was the latest in a series of one-sided games in the SFC this season. Picture: Harry Murphy/Sportsfile

In the wake of the hammerings that have been the hallmark of the provincial football championships this year, there is an understandable clamour for “something to be done”.

The “something” that has been hit on (again!) is structures.

Talk has already turned to the special congress planned in the autumn to discuss the proposals to redraw the championship.

The idea that radical structural change to the competitions — whether through the abolition of the provincial championships or the introduction of tiered championships — will fix the problem of hammerings is nonsense.

There are a number of points to be made here. Firstly, hammerings happen in every sport, all the time. To state the blindingly obvious, men routinely lose in three sets in the Wimbledon tennis championships; others fail to finish the marathon at the Olympic Games; horses are pulled up by their jockeys; and so on and on.

In America, in the NBA finals which are on at the moment, in the first three games the winning margin has never been less than 10 points and has been as high as 20. And this is between the two best basketball teams in America.

This story continues across sport.

In Gaelic football, the nature of the scoring of the game means large margins of victory are always going to happen. The top three or four teams cannot just continue to play each other on a loop; they must play somebody.

And in the last two years alone, Kerry and Dublin have given serious beatings to teams who are undeniably in the top 16 — and arguably the top 10 — teams in the country.

No redrawing of championship structures is going to change that. If anyone wishes to view the compelling evidence for why a tiered competition will not render most counties competitive, they need only look at the celebrated league system that people repeatedly trot out as something that works.

But basically one-third of the counties of Ireland have not even made it out of Divisions 3 and 4 for more than a year since the modern form of the league was constructed — that’s if they’ve made it out at all.

Any footballer who spends his days playing in the lower divisions of the National Football League will tell you just how unglamorous that is, running round the hamster wheel of the same circuit of opponents, home and away, spring after spring.

And yet people routinely posit the league as a model for development.

In the coming months we will have the usual stuff thrown around that presents the challenge of a multi-tiered championship as being one of marketing. There will be talk of ‘Tier Two’ All-Star awards and playing the B Final as a curtain-raiser to the A final and other trimmings that suggests that ‘Tier Two’ will be afforded much the same treatment as ‘Tier One’, just that the standard of football will be lower.

This is not what will happen. Again, the reality of sport is that attention is inevitably focused on the premium competition at the expense of almost all else.

More than that, there are basic questions that must be answered with clarity in advance of a restructuring about the purpose of the competition that is being redrawn: What precisely is the All-Ireland B Football Championship supposed to achieve? Is it intended as a means to close the gap between the weakest teams and the strongest?

If that is the purpose of the B championship, it is certain to fail as a measure in itself.

The proposition that it should be presented as a well-considered, strategic attempt to meet the needs of those who do not enjoy success, or who are not currently competitive at All-Ireland level, is not sustainable.

Indeed, it is worth restating that it will most likely perpetuate the existing gap in an out-of-sight, out-of-mind way.

Look at the history of hurling. In the last 100 years of championship hurling, there have been only three first-time winners of the All-Ireland senior hurling championship. They are Galway (1923), Waterford (1948) and Offaly (1981).

Currently, there is a multi-tiered system in place in hurling: this began with three tiers in 2005 and now extends across five. Before that there was a B All-Ireland Championship in place for decades.

Does anyone really imagine that the teams in, say, the bottom two tiers of hurling, will ever compete at Liam MacCarthy level, that they will use the tiered system to advance year after year? Or is it just better because they now “get to compete at their own level”, as if that is an end in itself?

Why will football be different? Why will this structural lurch in the dark bring a different outcome?

Again, the basic point is that without a wider programme of reform of funding, coaching, underage progression, investment in schools and club development for individual counties, a tiered championship will achieve nothing substantial, nothing that can transform competitiveness.

The bottom line in all of this is that there is no sense that any structural change is directed towards a particular vision.

No person in the GAA’s hierarchy has, so far, sketched out a vision of what they envisage the GAA should be. There has been no meaningful debate on any such vision. And without a clear idea of what it wishes to be, the GAA continues to make decisions on the hoof, in a disconnected manner.

It will attempt another quick-fix this Autumn in redrawing its football structures; it is this approach to decision-making which gives only the most limited room for optimism. This is not just a matter of disagreeing with individual decisions — that will always happen and should always happen. There should be dissent in every institution, or else it descends into group-think and inevitable rot.

But, instead, it is about stressing the importance of developing a coherent plan. To this end, any structural reform of the football championship must be part of a wider and detailed series of initiatives that offers genuine hope of transformation.

Structural reform of the championship will have to play a part — that is obvious — but it is not an answer in itself, no matter which way the Association decides to lurch. Real change will take time and the policies that will deliver will not take the form of a magic bullet.

- Paul Rouse is professor of history at University College Dublin