Gap isn’t just widening, it’s ballooning

This is the 15th year in which we have had qualifiers and an All-Ireland quarter-final stage and results in the last eaight seasons alone combine to paint a very depressing backdrop, writes Brendan O’Brien

Okay people, time to calm down and take stock. We’ve had five days to gather our thoughts and let the toxins from last weekend’s disappointing fare at Croke Park flush from our systems. Maybe now we can look at this thing with clear heads and dispense with the rush to judge Gaelic football as a game where only a privileged few can hope to succeed – no matter how true or not that may be. Let’s instead look at it dispassionately.

It was a depressing old time in the Big House. No doubt about that. Kildare’s embarrassment at the hands of Kerry took the biscuit, obviously, but there were few crumbs of comfort to be found in the other three games. Galway stayed with Donegal for a half and Fermanagh gave us a reason to smile in the last 10 minutes against Dublin. That’s fairly slim pickings. There is, undeniably, a trend across modern sports that is most unwelcome. The influx of money and expertise into the sector worldwide has raised standards in pretty much any sport you would care to mention and there is enough anecdotal evidence to suggest it has promoted the emergence of small elites becoming increasingly untouchable.

We have long seen as much in professional football. Not just across the water in England where the superclubs stand alone, but across Europe where Barcelona, Real Madrid, Paris Saint-Germain, Bayern Munich and Juventus are establishing a level of consistent excellence the chasing pack are finding simply beyond them.

The days of Norwich and Aston Villa chasing a league title are behind us. In rugby, the French behemoths are squeezing the pips out of everyone else. Toulon have won the last three European Cups and sides like Clermont Auvergne and Saracens in England are annual invitees to the semi-final dance. Gaelic football is moving to a similar tune. It says something when you could make a better case for more counties in the chase for Liam MacCarthy than you could for Sam Maguire and the lack of competitiveness in the big ball code last weekend was such that the Community Shield – that most passive of season openers to the English game – was more competitive than anything we saw in Dublin 3.

Part of the problem here may be expectations. Unrealistic ones, to be precise. That pat phrase about how ‘the championship doesn’t start until August’ has wormed its way into the general lexicon and our brains and the events of five years ago – when the four quarter-finals were still played over one weekend – are probably to blame for that.

It was a weekend when Down elbowed their way to the top of the bill with a famous six-point defeat of Kerry and by its close the other three provincial champions had been asked to leave the premises for the remainder of the summer, too. The scent of revolution was in the air, though a closer inspection of that time is revealing. The Kerry-Down game aside, was it all we remember it to be? True, Dublin finally made it past a Tyrone side that had long been a bete noire

but Cork strolled past Roscommon while being far from their best while Kildare had far too much for Meath. To paraphrase someone we all know: that sounds more like a good weekend than a great one. And yet the numbers don’t lie. This is the 15th year in which we have had qualifiers and an All-Ireland quarter-final stage and results in the last eight seasons alone combine to paint a pretty depressing backdrop. Put simply, the gap isn’t just widening, it is ballooning at a rate of knots and there is any amount of supporting evidence to back that up. Here are just two observations: the average winning margin in the first eight years of the quarter-finals was 3.5 points. That has shot up to 5.5 in the six years since and will increase significantly again by Monday even if the Donegal/Mayo and Monaghan/Tyrone games this weekend end on or near stalemate. The bookies, for what it is worth, see just a point separating the sides in both games. The more revealing statistic shows that, between 2001 and 2008, there were only two quarter-finals that coughed up a double-digit victory with Tyrone pummelling Fermanagh in 2003 and Dublin five years later. The last half-dozen years, by comparison, have delivered eight such annihilations with Kerry’s 27-point mauling of Kildare last week the worst ever. Draws, too, have all but disappeared.

It’s an annoying fact that, though the standard of football is arguably higher now than it ever has been, the strongest counties are improving at a rate that is leaving the rest behind. The result is that the old chestnut about the championship starting in August still rings true. It just doesn’t get going until the end of month now.

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