Pat Daly says flourishing League leading to better championship

GAA director of games Pat Daly believes the six-team division National Hurling League has been a success and played a part in the most competitive Championships in years.

Daly does not endorse the quarter-final aspect of the format, which see the top four in both divisions face off. In its first season last year, the four Division 1A teams won by an average of almost seven points.

However, Daly is convinced the five-round structure has led to a greater competitiveness later in the season.

“The last few years have been unprecedented and unparalleled in hurling, you’ve had three drawn All-Ireland hurling finals and you hadn’t one before that since 1969. I’m not attributing that totally to changes in league but it has to be a contributing factor.

“In addition, the quality of the games has been at an all-time high. When you have people like Eddie Gray, Brian Talbot, Peter Lorimer, Paul Reaney rejoicing about hurling because they see it on Sky, these are professional soccer players who played at the highest level and they can see the nature of the game and the skill level involved.”

Some of the complaints about the league in its current format are the lack of games, which provide little room for trial and error, and the quarter-final stages. Daly accepts concerns about the latter but he counters the arguments about the cut-throat nature of Division 1A and 1B.

“At the end of the day, if you deemed the league to be the second most important competition, which I believe it is, you can’t in the next breath talk about experimentation and expect people to take the thing seriously. Cup competitions are there where there’s plenty of room for experimentation.

“The whole situation has moved on to a panel-type situation much more so than teams so I’m not exactly sure that thing stacks up. I can see why team managers might complain about it because the games are competitive. The games in 1B will be just as competitive as 1A and that is ultimately what will bring teams on, playing at the highest standard they can play at.

“The other thing, the quarter-finals you have an anomalous situation there where the fourth team in tier two is coming through ahead of the fifth and sixth team in tier one. That was the outcome of a pretty protracted process concerning six or seven teams.

“But the six is the key to this. What other fine-tuning you want to do around that, that’s open for discussion and debate.”

Understandably with more games being played last season, attendances jumped but the 78% rise compared to 2013’s figures was impressive. Daly said attendances are just one factor in judging the success of a competition’s layout.

“Ultimately, when changes like this are being discussed, three fundamentals have to be looked at: the club/county balance which is number one; number two are the developmental needs/promotional profile and there is no point in teams going out and getting hockeyed in the league... if teams are competitive and the league is going down to the wire, that will boost the promotional profile. The third is revenue-generating potential.

“The challenge always is to look at the totality of what’s going on between the league and championship and factor those three principles into the process. Attendances tend to be looked at in isolation. Nobody wants to go to a game when it’s a dead rubber or there’s half a team out. They want to see players fully engaged in the process.”