What will the Championship landscape look like in 2016?

EARLIER this year, an unfamiliar wave crashed over Leinster football when Wexford, Carlow, Longford and Westmeath pushed their way to the front of the provincial queue and paired off in the U21 football semi-finals.

Aside from Westmeath’s two titles at the turn of the millennium, the rest of the competition’s history had been written without little input from that quartet and yet there they were brazenly occupying spots which Dublin, Kildare, Meath, Laois and Offaly had come to regard as birthrights.

A few weeks later, another weaker county sounded warning of own its intention to usurp the old order when Tipperary chairman Barry O’Brien declared the county’s ambition to compete in an All-Ireland football final by the year 2020.