Daly proposals aim to strike balance between club and county

THE GAA is open to the accusation that it is reneging on its responsibility to club players by continuing to embrace an inter-county structure that restricts their games activity.

The challenge now for the association, maintains head of games Pat Daly, is to achieve the optimum balance between club and county.

“It’s not going to be easy, it never was easy,’’ he says. “It’s becoming impossible at the moment to maintain the current structure, if we are in the business of promoting games and if the club is the basic unit,’’ he says.

The annual report to this weekend’s congress in Belfast features a detailed games overview by Daly which highlights the importance of restructuring the national fixtures schedule so

club players are properly accommodated.

In doing so, he reminds delegates of the task to be confronted next year in finalising a competitive framework at inter-county level that will not be subject to change until after 2009.

Most interesting of all, he puts

forward proposals to revamp the national leagues and to limit involvement in the principal championships to the top 20 teams in football and the top 10 in hurling.

Reaction at official level has been limited but positive. One county chairman who contacted him was prepared to more or less admit that the whole organisation of internal fixtures “is gone out of their hands”, that it’s largely determined and dictated by the fluctuating fortunes of the county team and the demands of the county manager. Club fixtures are postponed, sometimes indefinitely.

“If you want a provincial system and if you want a qualifier on the back of that, then it’s impossible to plan at club level because you don’t know when you are going to be continuing - or in what competition you are going to be involved in.

“It’s relatively straightforward if you are provincial champions. The option then is to decide if you play club games while you are waiting for your next game. But if you are in the qualifier it’s very difficult as you don’t know from week to week when you will be playing. That, obviously has major implications and repercussions for club fixtures,’’ he said.

His proposals would not lead to the elimination of the provincial championships.

“If you’re not in the top 20 in the league, you don’t compete in what we’d call the Sam Maguire. If there are five Ulster teams, they go into Ulster and the same with Leinster. The likelihood is that you won’t have five in Connacht or Munster, so you’d have outside teams there.

“Currently, you have New York competing in the Connacht football championship and London playing in Ulster in hurling.

“Kerry were talking about going into Ulster for hurling and the prospect of Galway going into Leinster is being mooted.

“What I’m proposing isn’t terribly different from that. You would maintain the Cork/Kerry involvement, but if the next three teams were not good enough they would be from outside the province.’’

He added: “What I am proposing is a league played on a straight league

basis and then a championship that is not organised on a knock-out basis. That would enable us to schedule games and once that’s done you can set out the club schedule,” he said.