EWAN MACKENNA: Lots of bling but no bang
Standing in a cramped corridor under the Cusack Stand on Saturday night, the first real game of 2013 had barely drawn its final breath and the Donegal manager wore a gentle smile as he spoke. This is a man that hates losing so much he’d essentially been unemployed for the past two years, devoting all his time to winning. But here and now, defeat didn’t bother him, and little wonder. “We’re probably at 65-to-70%,” he said. “It’s not something to get overly carried away with. We want to get enough points to stay in the division.”
His honesty had just launched the league — one of the most pointless competitions in sport.
The start of the season should be a showpiece occasion but despite the valiant efforts of both the GAA and Dublin County Board in trying to make it a spectacle, these games aren’t, and under the current format they never will be. It’s not that the standard is bad, rather that high-end sport is largely about winning and losing. Without the brutal choice between exhilaration and devastation for all stakeholders, it’s boring. Yet the majority of 112-round-robin games will be played out with a mentality McGuinness and others openly admit to: it’s better to avoid the drop while finding one or two players and honing tactics than it is to win out with the tried and tested.
What’s worse is, on average an inter-county side plays just over 11 competitive games per year. However over seven of those will be in this competition. In short, close to twice as many games that don’t matter are played out as games that do. But we are so wrapped up in familiarity that there is no contempt for the league, rather an acceptance of mediocrity and a waste of time and talent.
Consider this — while fans of other sports get regular high-profile matches that matter, and while players, managers and backroom teams in other sports work and train to test themselves at the highest level, we don’t get that in football. The best teams may all have finally rode in and hitched up in Division One, but still we must wait until August before they challenge one another. It makes no sense. Instead, what we got on Saturday night was what we already knew before Saturday night. Dublin are deeper than most in terms of talent, Kildare are very good but have enough flaws and problem positions to stop them being great, Donegal aren’t fit, and after dominating the league recently Cork finally realised it isn’t worth their while to do so again.
Any competition of importance involves hitting the ground running however the champions of the last three years have done no ball work. Instead, a side that has been back just over two months are in the gym on Tuesdays, doing fitness work on Thursdays and are expected to fit in another day of weights themselves. It explains the ball striking of Colm O’Neill and Donnacha O’Connor and explains why so few from Cork were troubled by it. Indeed on Saturday, Conor Counihan’s dummy team was actually stronger than his named team, which sums up so much. As for the best team in the nation, Donegal are only back training less than four weeks, and while they were subjected to a gruelling schedule of workouts on Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays after returning from Dubai, it’s all been to catch up on lost time rather than get ready for a tilt at a competition that dominates the inter-county calendar in terms of the number of games played.
Who can blame them? Of the 40 teams that have reached provincial finals in the last five seasons, only 12 reached any league final that same season. In the past three years, the All Ireland semi-finalists have won just 58% of round-robin league games. There’s little correlation between championship class and league form because there’s little interest.
Right now in football, there are so many exciting questions, from what Mick O’Dwyer can do with Clare, past dark horses like Laois and Monaghan and Roscommon, all the way up to how Jimmy McGuinness double-jobs at the top. There’s an exciting tactical revolution taking place. There’s a middle-class of teams that have never been as good at any point in football history. There’s better preparation and higher standards. Sadly though we waste all of that over the next few months and must wait until 65% of intercounty games are out of the way before we can enjoy what we have. In the meantime McGuinness and others will battle it out not to be the worst, rather than trying to be the best. Something to be endured rather than enjoyed.
