Let’s take the facts over footballing fake news
Like sitting in a restaurant after finishing the appetiser and waiting impatiently for the main dish to arrive, while an overly apologetic waitress makes excuses for the inordinate delay between courses each time she passes by the table.
‘It’s the chef’ she says… ‘Don’t you know, he’s always been this way’.
Despite the growing significance and appreciation of league football for the players, especially those playing in counties who are not realistic contenders for September glory, the championship remains the Holy Grail for most.
But Holy Grails are more of a dream than a realistic aspiration.
It holds an almost mythical context in our lives. The championship coincides with longer, brighter evenings, the smell of the cut grass, moulded studs and knock-out football. What more could you want?
It’s pretty much established and accepted that the National League is a superior competition, in terms of providing games for teams playing each other at a level relative to their own abilities.
It therefore creates more meaningful competition for the players and supporters to enjoy.
But now that all stops again until next season.
Well at least until August for everybody outside of Ulster.
We wouldn’t send U12s to play in an U16 championship because they would be out-matched, outgunned, and physically unable to deal with the rigours of playing against the big boys.
But we’ll continue to send our Division 3 and Division 4 teams to take on those ranked above them.
I mean, you’d have to imagine that Division 4 teams Carlow or Wexford are beside themselves with excitement at the prospect of facing Dublin in a Leinster quarter-final on the first weekend in June.
That’ll be ugly.
And while not wanting to rehash a well-worn path on championship restructuring ideas, if the likes of Carlow and Wexford and the rest of the perennial lower division counties don’t accept the need to take part in a second-tier championship competition, the league will continue to grow in importance but it’ll do little to enhance the overall quality of the quest for Sam Maguire.
Before we get into a series of provincial drubbings, it’s probably an appropriate time to step back and take stock of exactly where Gaelic football is right now.
The game has been much maligned in recent years for being overly robotic, both in terms of team structure and player decision-making.
It’s been portrayed as a very negative, cynical game where skills are seemingly diminishing before our very eyes at the expense of overly-cautious coaching preferring hand-passing to kicking and tackling instead of scoring.
The negativity came like a swarm of locusts descending on a field of crops.
Here are some facts.
Despite the harking back to simpler times, when players were all so absurdly talented that they could kick it over the bar from any angle, from 60 yards off either foot while wearing a blindfold and carrying a tray of beers for their team-mates in the other hand… those days never actually existed.
In fact, if you’re looking for quality, this past national football league campaign, across all divisions, is the second highest scoring season recorded over the past 10 years.
In the 2008 league for example, there were just over 2,900 scores compared with this season which produced over 3,500 scores.
That means more scores per game, per division. Who would have thought? We’re seeing more scores, not less. That is a fact.
igures released by the GAA headquarters last October showed another decline in championship attendances; an average of just 13,146 attended championship games in 2016, which is significantly down on the 2007 championship which saw an average of 20,172 supporters go to games.
But championship figures are only half the story... league attendances increased in 2017.
Some venues sold out or came close to doing so in Division 1, and TG4 recorded their highest ever viewership numbers with a peak audience of 642,000, and an average of 354,000 tuning in to watch Kerry and Dublin in the Allianz League Division 1 final from Croke Park.
That peak of 642,000 for the final was a jump of over 21,000 from the previous year between the same two sides, but that included the special 1916 commemoration extravaganza also. That is another indisputable fact.
In 2011, when Cork beat Dublin to claim the Division 1 title, it was watched by an average of 307,000 viewers.
The numbers are there, anecdotes aren’t necessary. Scoring is up, and so are attendances and TV viewing figures of league football.
There should be an obvious message there for everybody.
Supporters want to watch games between two relatively evenly matched teams and the national football league is doing a great job of satisfying that craving.
Despite the modern defensive set-ups, teams and coaches are finding ways around the traffic and scoring numbers are creeping up to almost record levels for league football.
We should be celebrating what the league is turning into, not lambasting it because of a handful of dreadful games.
Since the GAA began, there have always been terrible games, and there will continue to be.
But it’s only the revisionists amongst us who recall every football game from the ‘good-old-days’ as a 4-25 a piece shoot-out, with nothing but long kicking and high-fielding to feast your eyes on.
If you listen closely enough, you’re likely to hear them tell you that it used never rain in Ireland back then, either.
Precipitation only came in with the new defensive tactics in football to make it harder for the forward to keep his feet.
The facts are, the first half of the year has culminated in the highest ever last round of league football with a total of 42 goals and 419 points scored across all four divisions on the final day of league action.
The Division 1 final was a fantastic spectacle and was the most watched league final on television in the history of TG4.
Before we start grumbling about the inequality of the provincial championships in the next few weeks and months, take a moment to fully appreciate the high quality of the national league just finished.
