Format as good as it’s going to get
Knowing the quality of the man, I know his complaint isn’t selfishly motivated; he made that statement before the Munster final, before this Sunday’s Leinster final, when either Kilkenny or Wexford would stand to gain if the winners were to proceed directly to an All-Ireland semi-final.
Much as I respect his views, however, I disagree with him. The revamped Hurling Development Committee (HDC) is examining the system with a view to making adjustments. My earnest hope is that those adjustments will be confined to the minimum.
Many, many times I’ve offered my own idea about the whole GAA fixtures schedule. I’m not going to go over that again, but I’m realistic enough to know it will never happen.
What the old HDC came up with, however, is about as good as we’re ever going to get. I would make one change, and it wouldn’t come as a recommendation either, but as a command; Galway to play in the Leinster championship, with the same to apply to the winners of the Christy Ring Cup, if that team happens to be from Ulster or Connacht.
I said this when the current format was introduced, and say it again now; this was nearly as good as it was going to get. It retained the Munster and the Leinster championships, the two championships with real tradition; it gave an incentive to teams to reach the finals of those two championships; it gave teams that failed to reach that stage a second and third bite of the cherry; it gave us competitive and meaningful games at the business end of the championship. And it threw up the best team at the end of the year.
The talk now is that the winners of Munster and Leinster will go straight through to the All-Ireland semi-finals, with reduced places on offer for those unfortunates in the qualifying groups, just one emerging from each group to play the beaten provincial finalists in two quarter-finals, all others eliminated. Wrong move.
To those who think otherwise, I’d say the new system was definitely not designed solely to give the weaker teams a second chance. It was conceived with a number of different factors in mind, of which the second-chance scenario was just one (a second chance which benefits all, not just the weak).
A bigger reason was to cut out the kind of mismatches we were getting under the old system at All-Ireland semi-final level, especially, but even in the final on occasions. Another reason, but no less compelling, was to increase the number of top-class hurling matches, thus increasing the profile of hurling itself. That reason is why I disagree with John Allen.
It’s the end of June, championship in full flow for nearly two months; we’ve had one worthwhile game, and that only came on Sunday in Thurles. Not a classic, by any means, but it was a competitive game of reasonable standard. That’s nothing new, of course, in either the Munster or Leinster championships; teams rise, teams fall, and as often as not the games are only average. The qualifiers also are going to have more than their share of non-events. The teams who weren’t competitive in their own provinces are again going to be fodder for those teams with bigger ambitions.
FOR the moment, and probably for the foreseeable future — unless the weaker counties finally see sense and avail of the rule that allows them recruit up to five players from the stronger counties — we are going to have the situation where the qualifying series is all about eliminating one of five from the All-Ireland quarter-finals.
Theoretically then we should have four decent quarter-finals. Is that going to happen every year? Of course not, but it happened last year: Cork/Waterford, Galway/Tipperary, Kilkenny/Limerick and Clare/Wexford. It should happen again this year, looking like more or less the same eight teams, with the possibility of Limerick losing out to Offaly.
It should happen every year. With a game against the runners-up of the two qualifying groups, the provincial winners get reward enough. If they go directly through to the semi-finals, we lose two top-class games.
With football having such a high profile, hurling can ill afford such a loss. Keep the current format, but mandate Galway to play in Leinster, along with any Ulster or Connacht team that should happen to win the Christy Ring Cup.
That will do.
