Qualifiers’ fading intrigue shows it’s time for a Top 16
There they were, the best and brightest emerging pundit and presenter in Gaelic Games, doing their best to muster enthusiasm about the first-round football qualifier draw, but they were struggling. Whelan has been one of the most strident and articulate voices calling for competition reform, while the stilted nature of Frehill’s exuberance was exposed when he blurted out, “The tie of the round has to be Derry versus Sligo.”
That’s right: the Division Two champions at home to a side lucky to avoid relegation from Division Three and beaten by London.
The qualifiers used to offer intrigue and novelty for anyone reared on the brutal do-or-die championship.
As a reporter, you’d watch those Sunday evening draws anticipating where the wonderful magical backdoor journey could take you. We can still smell the burgers when the Dubs came to Clones to play Derry in 2003; still see Fr Brian D’Arcy dancing in the rain with Dominic Corrigan when Fermanagh stunned Mayo in Markievicz Park; or when Sligo so nearly finished Kerry’s summer in 2009.
Just three short years ago Donegal and Mayo were the first two teams out of the championship, humbled by Armagh and Longford, on a crazy, magical Saturday evening in June. There’ll hardly be such early-season tremors this year, just like there hasn’t been in the provincial championships.
History will show that the noughties were an under-appreciated, wondrous time for football. Never was the little guy so competitive and never were there so many competitive little guys.
The backdoor, along with the old Division 1A-1B league format, was instrumental in that.
Contrary to popular myth, the qualifiers served the little guy extremely well, giving him a second chance, not just the big guy. Westmeath’s odyssey in 2001; Sligo’s in 2002; Fermanagh’s in 2003 and 2004; Monaghan in 2007. In 2008 Wexford not only got to redeem themselves after being thumped by Dublin but managed to have a longer summer than those big boys in blue.
With the possible exception of 2001, when Roscommon’s reward for winning Connacht was to run up against Galway in the All-Ireland series, what ‘little guy’ was denied a real shot at glory by a returning big gun entering through the back door? Cork, by virtue of Kerry avenging those Munster defeats in Croker? Here’s the point. The backdoor is no longer serving the little guy or the big ball well. While the qualifiers have been largely wonderful for football, it’s time for football to start seeing something or someone else.
Yet again we’re almost halfway through a championship that feels like it has yet to start.
Conservatives in the GAA and the GAA media argue this has often been the case, as if that’s reason to keep the status quo. That generation of reporter was also largely passive in the 1990s when this writer’s generation was routinely listening to players frustrated that they were investing too much effort in return for one guaranteed championship game. Eventually the clamour for change became inescapable.
Those same few months that saw the old Football Development Committee drafting new structural proposals, Congress shut them down and Paraic Duffy amended them into the qualifiers, another sporting journey began.
Munster rugby’s Heineken Cup odyssey captured the public imagination and rugby has remained there ever since.
There was no Rabo Direct when the qualifiers were born. Ronan O’Gara and Brian O’Driscoll weren’t on television and dominating dinner-party conversation every weekend. It’s a different game and world now.
The qualifiers were for the dial-up generation but now there is another generation of player who knows only broadband. He isn’t grateful for being given one more game every summer. He wonders about heading to America and the value of a backdoor run like the one the Tipperary footballers had last summer when they reached the last 12 but knew that wasn’t a true measure of their ranking. Players want a programme of games during the summer. Teams need them. During the league, Peter Canavan’s Fermanagh almost won promotion to Division Two, playing seven games in 10 weeks.
Then they didn’t play a game for 10 weeks. That layoff is so damaging for the development of a team, it’s farcical.
During the league we watch Paul Kerrigan, Aidan O’Shea, Marc Ó Sé and Stephen Cluxton play fellow big guns weekly. Then we watch those players spend most of May, June, July hammering lightweights.
The balance is wrong. The format is wrong. It’s stagnant. We’ll say it again. Have your provincial championship, but then run a Top 16 championship along with an intermediate championship. That way the little guy still gets to play, sometimes shock, the big guy, or he’s fighting for the right to fight the big guy. We get to see the big guys fight each other more often.
For a summer or two too many now too many of us are spending too much of the summer speculating about reforming the championship rather than enjoying it.
That’s the fault of the GAA’s, not ours.
