Revamp required urgently to save summer from fall
What odds that the top seven teams in this year’s Allianz FL Division 1 will have no one outside the top seven get within seven points of them this summer? Already this championship Galway, Limerick and Tipperary have been steamrolled by either 17 or 18 points.
Next weekend Waterford, Offaly and Westmeath will also learn the hard way just how big the gulf between the top division and the rest is.
Watching Kerry and Tipp on the box last Sunday, we couldn’t help but feel that the GAA don’t think enough about how they run their competitions.
As Limerick hurling manager John Allen reminded everyone the other week, the league isn’t just supposed to be secondary to championship but to serve as preparation for the championship.
For the Tipperary footballers, though, just like most teams outside the top two divisions, the league has become more important than the championship. It’s a truer measure of their ranking and progress.
Yet most of those league games are played in the mud, wind and rain and when they’re supposed to be in heavy training for the real stuff — Kerry in Killarney, a game they’re almost bound to lose.
After Killarney, they might have one more game. That’ll be it then for another year which only promises another winter in Division 4 and probably Kerry again in the first round for a fifth consecutive year.
As Galway learned, even Division 2 football is proving to be inadequate preparation for a summer clash with the big boys of Division 1.
This writer has been almost a lone voice in questioning why the powers-that-be did away with the old Division 1A-1B format that served the sport so well from 2000 to 2007. In that time contesting league semi-finals you had Roscommon, Sligo, Cavan, Laois, Fermanagh, Limerick and Wexford, most of whom were competitive in the championship too.
There’s little chance of such novelty when it comes to league semi-finals or All-Ireland quarter-finals now.
Unwittingly the new Division 1 format is shaping as much as reflecting the divide between the top teams and the rest.
It’s not just that playing the likes of Kerry, Cork, Donegal, Dublin and Mayo weekly conditions a team to operate at a far quicker pace than a Division 2 outfit. We the public likewise have become so accustomed to seeing the big boys play one another weekly during the spring, most football this side of August feels anti-climatic.
Now that the battle of Ballybofey has come and gone, what game is supposed to excite the neutral before August? Maybe Dublin-Kildare in five weeks’ time; Cork-Kerry then in Killarney on July 7. That’s three heavyweight encounters over three whole months.
We had that number alone the day of the last round of the league. In Omagh there was the clash of the two counties of the ’00s in Kerry and Tyrone; in Ballybofey, the clash of the last two All-Ireland champions; and in Cork with the visit of Mayo, the two teams that had met in last year’s league final.
That day spoiled us, teased us. The big boys play one another too often in the spring and not enough in the summer.
If the current championship structure is to remain pretty much intact, then the league needs to revert to the old Division 1A-1B format, while retaining divisions 3 and 4 as they are.
But if we had our way we’d change the entire structure fundamentally — league and championship.
As fine a competition as it has become, the league will still always only be the league to the public; taking up too much time for too little. So scrap it. Start with a provincial league that allows for mid-week scheduling and whose placings dictate the seeding for the provincial championship, which is run off in May.
Then as Tipperary manager Peter Creedon has advocated, run a senior and intermediate All-Ireland championship, featuring 16 teams in each, with pools of eight teams in each. Everyone has three games at home, three on the road and one in Croke Park. The top team in each pool goes through to the All-Ireland semi-final. Second and third make the All-Ireland quarter-final playoffs. Three teams go down to intermediate, three teams come up.
Everyone wins this way. Clubs know when they’re out because they know when the county is out. Louth can still aspire to winning Leinster while playing, maybe upsetting, the likes of Tyrone and Mayo. Tipperary get a series of games in the summer against comparable opposition. The fight to stay up and get up would be ferocious. Leitrim get to play in Croke Park every year when they haven’t played there since ’94. The big guns play each other regularly without knowing they’ll make it to August.
At least try it out for a few years. The more such reform is put on hold, the more it feels the championship is on hold until August.
