GAA has programme the wrong way around

We don’t know if you took in any of the 11 National Football League games decided by a single score last weekend — or any of the 14 that were decided by just two — but yours truly was lucky enough to do so, making our way into Cusack Park, Ennis, for the visit of Ulster champions Donegal.

Not that there’s many people who monitor or can judge this sort of thing, but even allowing for the fact it was played in January, it was probably as good a game of football as the old ground has hosted this millennium, outside possibly a Mayo-Cork U21 All-Ireland final or two.

It was the ideal challenge for both sides, given where each is at this point in their development.

This is Clare’s sixth season now under the steady hand of Colm Collins, a tenure in which the county has been as competitive for as sustained period as it ever has been in its history, outside of — or alongside — the John Maughan and John O’Keeffe years in the ’90s. Progress has been followed by consolidation, a form of progress in itself.

After winning Division Three and an All-Ireland quarter-final spot in 2016, this is now Clare’s third straight year operating in Division Two.

During that time they’ve beaten their traditional overlords Cork both home and away in the league and rattled both Mayo and Kerry at home in the championship. A win over Donegal last Sunday though would have represented their greatest scalp under Collins, even bigger and better than knocking Roscommon out of the championship in Salthill three years ago or beating Cork on the double.

Roscommon, after burning it up early on in that 2016 season, were spent by July, while Cork have been a shadow of what normally represents that county. Donegal came to Ennis as reigning Ulster champions, starting with eight of the side that also started against Fermanagh in Clones last June.

They have made the last eight of the All-Ireland series in all but one of the past eight seasons.

Several observers, like now former Cork player Colm O’Neill, consider them the side best placed to threaten Dublin’s supremacy this summer. To take them down would have signified more than just the capture of two points for Clare.

For Bonner, in turn, Clare on the road was just the test for the young players he was trying out in the absence of big names like Murphy and the five Mcs of McBrearty, McGlynn, McGee, McGrath, and Mac Niallais.

Going up against a gritty, honest team with some special veterans of their own in the likes of Gary Brennan and David Tubridy was a considerable step up from what they’d have encountered in the MacKenna Cup.

In the first half Clare kicked eight points, all but one from play, yet still trailed by two points at the break, as Donegal made 91% of their shots, a scoring efficiency which Collins would afterwards describe as “off the scales”.

In the second half, the scoring rate would slow down, but we were still treated to a lively contest.

Brennan would finish with three points, all kicked on the run. The terrifically astute and accurate Tubridy likewise finished with three from play, as so would Jason McGee and Paul Brennan for Donegal, after each kicking a few bombs out on the wing.

In the end the visitors would pass the Ennis test, kicking a couple of injury-time points to edge out on a scoreline of 16 points to 13.

Leaving the ground, it occurred to us how much of a shame it was that there was unlikely to be a football game of such quality and novelty to look forward to there this summer.

In Clare football circles, all everyone talks about when it comes to the county team is whether they can retain their Division Two status. That is the definition of a good season. No one talks about the Munster championship.

Because for Clare folk, like a lot of folk from elsewhere these days, the provincial championship represents groundhog day.

For the fifth time in six years, Clare are on the same side of the draw as Kerry (the one time they had the novelty of playing someone else in a Munster final — Cork, in 2015 — coincided with Clare’s least impressive year in the Collins era). While they put it up to Kerry at home in 2014 and 2017 and might well do so again in 2019, no-one outside Collins’ panel expects them to win, and inside that Clare camp, there must be serious doubts as well. Kerry seem to represent either too great a jump in class or too much historical baggage to shed.

A loss would naturally leave them facing into the qualifiers. Under Collins, Clare have won at least one round in the backdoor, bar that substandard season of 2015. But after that, it really does depend on the luck of the draw. Last year, after beating Offaly in Tullamore, they were drawn against Armagh. Even though their name was first out of the pot, they had to travel to the Athletic Grounds, the GAA having a provision that all D1 or D2 teams drawn against anyone from D3 or D4 in the qualifiers are away.

In other words, instead of being rewarded for retaining their Division Two status, Clare were punished for it come championship, and instead had to play away against a side that had just won promotion to play them in Division Two. In the end, Armagh and home advantage shaded it.

Despite having one of the most successful seasons in their history — finishing third in Division 2 — Clare were finished for the year, having played none of their four championship games in front of their home crowd.

To put it bluntly, the league has been a proper measure of Clare’s worth and progress under Collins. The championship has not — even though the Banner made it to the All-Ireland quarter-finals in 2016.

The Clare dilemma compounds what a lot of people feel after the weekend’s football action. That the GAA has this the wrong way around.

That a Clare should be playing and hosting a Donegal in the summer, not winter. And that a Clare should be playing a Kerry and Limerick in the early part of the year, not the summer.

There is a growing intolerance for the provincial championships, especially after last year. While last weekend featured only two games where more than six points separated the teams — and who is going to complain about Carlow beating Sligo by seven points and Leitrim whipping Wexford by 13 considering the highly-contrasting positions those counties were at just a few years ago? — in last year’s provincial championships 17 of the 29 games were decided by seven points or more.

Another few years like that and people will be calling for them to be scrapped altogether.

That would be a shame. As we’ve said here before, an Eamonn O’Hara deserves better than for his grandkid to bafflingly enquire what the pride of his football life, a Connacht medal, is. And as Neil Ewing made clear in these pages last summer, Sligo footballers still aspire to winning a Connacht medal.

But that dream, that competition, shouldn’t necessarily take up two of the most precious months in the entire calendar. Instead, it should be the prep for a more league-based championship, not the league being the supposed warm-up for the provincial championship.

Clare are a perfect example of a county that would benefit from it.

In a round-robin provincial championship played in February and March, they’d still get to test themselves against a Kerry side gradually ramping up for the year ahead, and also Cork, and Tipperary, a side they’ve yet to meet in the championship during Collins’ tenure.

For years now Clare have felt they’re the second-best team in Munster.

Such a championship would allow them to put that to the test and possibly play in a Munster final. Then in the championship, they’d get to host a series of games against top teams, just like they do in the league this spring — the likes of Donegal, Cork again, Meath.

The clubs could benefit as well. Say every county was to play three games in May, followed by a three-week window for the clubs, before the championship would resume for every county in early July for at least a few games.

The club player would get to play with the ground hard.

And every county would be resuming action on the same weekend, unlike last year when a Dublin could abide by April as a club month as they only had Wicklow in the first round on May 26 but a Galway and Mayo hardly could with their showdown in Castlebar on May 12.

There have and will be other columns on what format exactly a new league-based championship should look like, and how many teams should feature in a senior championship and how many in some intermediate grade. But the competitiveness of the leagues offers a template.

These are cracking, evenly-contested games, superior to most of what we’ll be served up when the sun is high in May and June.

Only it’s still January. It’s still only the league. Teams like Clare might be near full throttle but the crowd and the public is still only wakening and warming up to fact that the GAA year is here. It’s why there was less than 5,000 in Ennis last Sunday.

But were Donegal descending down on the town again in the summer, there’d be a far greater buzz and sense of anticipation around the place than there will be for the biannual visit of Kerry.

Flip it.