Dara Ó Cinnéide: Madness needs to stop
His call comes in the wake of former Meath skipper Anthony Moyles’ backing for a second tier football championship for developing and weaker counties.
Ó Cinnéide, Kerry’s 2004 All-Ireland winning captain, was a member of the committee that proposed the secondary SFC competition, which lasted for five years before being axed after its 2008 staging, involving Division 4 counties who had failed to reach their respective provincial final and then lost in the qualifiers.
The Irish Examiner columnist re-emphasised his support for former GAA president Seán Kelly’s idea to split the All-Ireland SFC in two after the provincial series with those 16 counties not featuring in the provincial finals or finishing in the top eight in the National League playing in the Tommy Murphy Cup. After the first year the cup winners and finalists of it would qualify for the All-Ireland series.
Speaking to LMFM Radio, Moyles warned more of the better players from the weaker counties will become disenchanted with Gaelic football.
Citing Leitrim captain Emlyn Mulligan, who has taken a year out this season, as an example, he said: “You can see frustration coming out in the best lads and for all those fellas you hear about there are 17, 18, 19, 20-year-olds who are up-and-coming and might just say ‘ah, do I really want to do this? Do I really want to be training five or six times a week?’
“If you’re Bernard Brogan or a lad playing with Donegal or Tyrone you’re saying ‘I’ve a good chance of winning an All-Ireland pretty much any year’, there’s your motivation.
“But that discrepancy and that second tier or whatever you want to call it I think it’s going widen and it’s going to widen even more.”
Ó Cinnéide points out no county with a population of less than 100,000 has won the Sam Maguire Cup since Offaly in 1982. He recalls weaker football counties initially supporting the Tommy Murphy Cup only for their support to wane thereafter.
“It depends on the players and public in the counties likely to be in the Tommy Murphy Cup saying ‘we’re in a competition playing at our own level’. At the moment, the only competition that Carlow, for example, can aspire to is the Sam Maguire. That’s madness, that’s nuts.
“How does that work for a Carlow player in practice at this time of year? They should aspire to championship football in months when the ball is hopping hard off the ground. Every player needs to do but let’s be honest nobody is getting excited about May 16 when Offaly play Longford. There’s a sense of inevitability about it, that whatever happens one of them will get hockeyed by Dublin at the end of the month.
“The same is likely to happen at Munster semi-final time. No matter how many bricks Tipperary (if they beat Waterford) are building or how much progress they’re making and you’ll have Kerry people coming out at the time saying ‘Tipperary are doing great work’ the reality is nobody in Kerry fears that they’re going to be beaten by Tipperary.”
Ó Cinnéide regards the mass summer emigration of players as a symptom of the malaise within the inter-county structure where many counties have nothing worth playing for after they exit the provincial championships.
He accepts the problem with the original Tommy Murphy Cup was the lack of promotion access to the All-Ireland series. “The one missing link was in Sean Kelly’s proposal that the winners of the Tommy Murphy Cup come into the following year’s Sam Maguire championship. That’s a huge incentive.
“We cling onto this notion of ‘ah, Fermanagh in 2004 and Wexford in 2008’ but they were crazy, crazy exceptions. More often than not it was based on the passion and zeal of one individual, of a good manager coming in and having a bounce off it. It goes away then when the manager goes away, back to the old shite. It has to stop somewhere.
“I am surprised when I hear players from counties that would be possibly Tommy Murphy teams that they don’t want a two-tier championship. It is two tier already! They say ‘we’re not a B team’. Nobody is calling them a ‘B’ team. We’re trying to give you an opportunity to play a game and a championship that you can actually win and then progress to play the big boys.”
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