Larry Ryan: Won’t new Gaelic football structure leave counties leagues apart?
FAMILIAR FOES: David Clifford of Kerry in action against Cillian Brennan of Clare in the championship. Is an end in sight to these regular Munster meetings of the counties? And if so, who will benefit most?
Under the 1972 Fill Space Accord, every sportswriter in the land is allocated 10 columns per year proposing silver bullet fixes to the Gaelic football championship.
But mindful of the potential damage to the profile to Gaelic football — and the sustainability of newspapers — if the championship format was ever fixed and there was nothing left to talk about, I’ve never applied for the grant aid.
Anyway, there’s too much work involved in producing at least one draft submission annually, charting an alternative labyrinthine process of finding the All-Ireland champions.
Ideally, an engineer’s report is required to verify the structure won’t collapse due to the number of back doors.
But this year — much like every year, to be fair, but still — the urgency seems to be there. There’s a real sense that something has to be done. That change is needed.
A lot of the initial impetus, you have to say, seemed to be coming from Kerry direction.
Traditionally, when Kerry folk turn outside the county and consider the greater good, they have tended to focus their energies on advising Cork. Despite age-old enmities, there has always been a solid bedrock of goodwill there for a good Cork football team to emerge capable of holding Kerry to four or five points, early in the summer.
Latterly, though, they have widened that brief and appear more concentrated on devising a system capable of throwing up anyone at all good enough to be beaten by four or five points, early in the summer, to tune Kerry up for the business end.
Of course it’s debatable how high the priorities of the county that sits atop the honour roll should figure when attempting to redraw a fairer version of football.
Which brings us to the central contradiction at the heart of the latest attempt to remodel the sport.
There are two proposals, as you probably know. One a half-hearted effort which displaces a few counties across provincial lines to even up the numbers. This would cause uproar, if it ever came to pass.
Though if we want to fire up Shane Lowry’s angry bear routine well in advance of Rome ‘23, it might be an idea to banish Offaly to Munster.
And the other option is a league, opening out via double doors into an avant garde patio of a knockout phase, with opportunities, for example, for the 25th best team in the country to join the best five in the last eight.
And there’s the rub. That system might indeed provide plenty of nice tune-up fixtures for Kerry, before the business end. As well as Dublin, Mayo, and Tyrone. With a decent safety net of five to qualify from eight keeping jeopardy relatively low.
But why is this restructure being sold as the great leveller?
If one of the chief grumbles about championship is the number of hammerings the top sides dish out, why give them more quality matches against each other to make them even stronger when they face the lesser lights?
Limerick manager Billy Lee warned on these pages yesterday that if change doesn’t happen, the gap between haves and have-nots will only widen.
But what will this really do for the teams in the basement? What will a group of eight in Division 4 that sends one winner on to be hammered by its tuned-up betters really achieve? Besides a pile of dead rubbers.
As the new book by James Dixon — — reminds us, eight different countries provided champions of the old European Cup between 1983 and 1993. When it was knockout. Then it was remodelled into a makeshift league and gradually sown up by a cartel of powerhouses.
“The high-rollers wanted bigger stakes and fewer risks. The more games they could play against each other, the more revenue they would pocket.”
Arguably better for us all to watch, for sure. But hardly a great equaliser of haves and have nots.
Surely one of the greatest drivers of imbalance in Gaelic football is that the powerhouses play on at the business end, long after the also-rans have packed up for the year. Keeping fitness and morale ticking over into the next campaign.
And isn’t the greatest Gaelic football problem existential rather than structural? That there is a perfectly fine league system already in place, if only anybody wanted to win it.
So would it not be worth a try — in a move not unfamiliar to more or less every other team sport in the world — to play the two competitions at the same time?
Banish the provinces to spring, as your pre-season. Then — excuse me while I fill out the grant form — A and B open draw championships, 16 teams in each — give or take an exile or two — based on last year’s league finish. Straight knockout. Four games to win your All-Ireland.
Meanwhile, the league runs at the same time, with maybe one round before the championship openers — to give Kerry some class of tune-up.
From there, the championship is fitted in between league rounds, like the FA Cup. And everybody finishes their season at the same time, save maybe the four finalists.
And if Kerry are knocked out, God forbid, in the first round, having not been sufficiently tuned, might they not carry on and try and win the league anyway, to salvage something from the year? And in the process, gradually raise interest in and prestige of that competition.
And eventually, maybe, you might try to do the double, of league and championship, to really prove your worth. Or even the treble, if you’ve won the spring competition.
All the while, Division 3 is a dogfight for promotion to the race for Sam. And the potential prize of a kind first round draw or even a chance to catch Kerry cold in the opener, moving three games from glory.
Wouldn’t that allow everybody dream a little bigger?
