Trevor Giles: The provinces have had their day - GAA should move on

Former Meath and Skyrne footballer Trevor Giles in attendance at the launch of the 2021 Beko Club Champion, a competition to reward and celebrate local GAA club heroes who go above and beyond to help their local club. Picture: Sam Barnes/Sportsfile

Meath legend Trevor Giles is in favour of the provincial football championships being consigned to the scrapheap.

While the two-time All-Ireland winner has not studied in any great detail the two proposals to reform the All-Ireland SFC that will go before Special Congress next month, he’ll not object to any recommendation that advocates a move away from the province-based structure.

The four conferences of eight proposal that will be voted on by delegates next month seeks to keep the provincial championships at the heart of the All-Ireland SFC, whereas the League-based championship would sever the link between the provincial championships and All-Ireland series.

Giles said he can see a day when the provincial competitions are no longer part of the football championship fabric, but whether that comes as quickly as next month’s Special Congress, where the All-Ireland SFC League proposal requires 60% backing, remains to be seen.

“Ulster would be the difficult one in that it is really competitive and I’m sure the Ulster Council will fight tooth and nail to hold on to that, and I can appreciate that. But the other three are lopsided,” said Giles.

“The provincial championships don’t excite me, they haven’t excited me for a lot of years. I know Dublin have come back a little bit, but I expect a big bounce from Dublin next year having been beaten by Mayo this year, so you couldn’t say with confidence that next year’s Leinster championship is going to be very competitive. If they got rid of the provincial championships, it wouldn’t cost me a thought whatsoever.

“The ’90s was a glory era in Leinster, without harping back to the past. We had Meath winning Leinster, Offaly, Dublin, Westmeath, Kildare — it was really competitive with huge crowds and it would be great to see it back to that again.

“But I’m not seeing a really competitive Leinster championship for the next few years, so if the proposals say get rid of the Leinster championship and other provincial championships, that’s fine by me.”

With Meath having won three of the last four Leinster minor football championships, as well as this year’s All-Ireland minor title, Giles said the recent appointment of Barry Horgan as general manager of age-grade football in the county is acknowledgement that more can be done to bridge the gap from minor (U17) to U20 and on to senior level.

“We have had good success at minor level. Some of those teams haven’t improved as much as you would have liked when they came to U20. You are at a certain level at 18, you have to improve at 19, you have to improve more at 20, 21, and become a really good senior player. That is the trick for Meath, to try and get that going.”

At senior level, where Meath have only once reached the quarter-finals of the championship in the past 10 years, Giles cited as imperative the need for greater consistency from the county’s flagship side.

“We had a big game during the year with Kildare to get promotion to Division 1 and we didn’t perform. It was a great performance in the second-half of the Leinster semi-final and we really competed with Dublin, so we need to be consistent.

If you are a Meath footballer, you should be going to training this winter feeling you have a slightly more realistic chance of winning a Leinster championship than maybe the last few years when Dublin were so good.

“When we talked ourselves up in Meath, Dublin took us very seriously and absolutely wiped us, like they did last November in the Leinster final when we thought we had closed the gap. This year, we didn’t talk ourselves up so much and we competed much better.

“In Meath, we just need to get the head down, get everyone fit and available, train really hard, and try to take the example of our minors and our ladies that when you are playing these stronger teams you really have a go at them.”

In this, the 50th year of the All-Star awards, Giles, a three-time winner, remarked that the All-Star system is “imperfect” and “too weighted” towards the All-Ireland finalists.

“For years there, whoever got man of the match in the All-Ireland final got an All-Star even if they were middling for the whole year up to then. All that stuff isn’t correct.”