Hurl out these convoluted systems

THREE months into the new hurling season and what have we learned? Well, we have had confirmation again that the league doesn’t mean a whole lot to most teams.

Admittedly the final was superb and both Tipperary and Galway are to be congratulated for the way they approached not just that game but the league in general. Everyone else? They could take it or leave it.

To every club in the competing counties, however, it is very much a big deal. For the three months we’ve already had of this competitive hurling season, plus probably a few weeks before that, how many clubs have had to plan without their inter-county players? How many rounds of championship have been played?

And for what – so the various counties can spend over a third of the season experimenting.

We now sit back and wait six or seven weeks for the championship to begin, a period during which most counties will try to squeeze in a club championship round or two.

After that, most clubs in most of the top hurling counties will again wait, and wait, and wait, while the intercounty championship gets on its merry way.

As with many major sports worldwide, the hurling championship has four major groupings. And that, unfortunately, is about as far as it goes when it comes to comparisons with the way most other sporting organisations run their top competitions. A look at the hurling ‘groupings’:

One group (Connacht) has five possible teams but only one takes part these days, thus automatically goes forward to a second phase – that’s Galway, a Division One team.

The next group (Ulster) has 10 teams (including London), none of which will be in the top flight next season, eight of whom take part in preliminary rounds from which two emerge to take on the two strongest teams in the group at semi-final stage, the eventual winner then going forward to phase two.

The third group (Leinster) has a possible 12 teams, only six of which bother to take part, before eventually Kilkenny are crowned champions after another facile campaign (as has happened on nine of the last ten occasions) while our fourth group (Munster) has a possible six teams but only five compete, ‘only’ being a relative term here, as all five are Division One teams.

While the endgame is being played out in groups three and four, phase two will be taking place, involving initially the meeting of the ‘winners’ of group one (Galway) and group two (Antrim), with the pre-final losers in groups three and four then coming into action, all getting a second bite at the cherry.

Two teams will eventually emerge from this cluster, to meet the losing teams in the finals of groups three and four (Leinster and Munster) in the quarter-finals; awaiting them in the semi-finals, the two winners of those two groups (Kilkenny and another team and an All-Ireland final on September 7.

While all this is going on most of the hurlers in the land will be sitting at home waiting, and waiting and waiting for their own serious business to continue.

Read back through the above few paragraphs again, digest it, then ask yourselves – how in the name of all that’s holy can such a convoluted system be considered anything but outrageously unfair and unbalanced.

This is non-intelligence on a grand scale. Once more I offer a straight-forward solution to this whole, self-inflicted problem the GAA has with fixtures, with the blatant lack of balance in its top championship. It is this: scrap everything you have now at inter-county level – the provincial championships, the All-Ireland championship as currently formatted, the National League, the Mickey Mouse early-season cups and tournaments.

Have a National League Championship, four divisions, promotion and relegation, home and away games, the winners crowned league champions, the top four in seeded play-offs for the All-Ireland. One week on, one week off during the regular season, the county players to go back to their clubs on the week off, where a format similar to that at inter-county would operate, as many eight-team divisions within each county as necessary (or nine-team, or 10, no problem), hurling and football alternating weekends, club games on Saturday evening, county games on Sunday.

It would be very demanding on dual players but so be it. I’m telling ye, this is a workable, sensible solution, could be implemented overnight. But it won’t; too simple, you see. Instead we’ll continue to have even more convoluted and confusing systems for league and championship tried out and rejected, year after year. For this year, it has already started.

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