Choosing red option at Congress will give better balance to inter-county season

Colm O'Rourke

Proposals are revolutionary as the provincial route is no longer the way into the All-Ireland championships

General view of Croke Park pitch. Photo: Ray McManus/Sportsfile

January 16 2022 02:30 AM

We are back on the merry-go-round as we try to square the circle that is the All-Ireland football championship, or to at least find a format which makes some sense of the manure heap which it is at present.

The story so far: Last October there was a Special Congress to try and bring in a new system. One proposal passed but it is only democracy if there is a 60pc majority in the GAA. It’s better not to ask why this is so, but if you must know then read Mao Tse Tung, the Chinese communist leader who wrote many of the GAA’s theories in his little red book. He once said that “a revolution is not a dinner party”. We all know what that means in his context but he had a different way of getting his revolution started.

After the failure of the October revolution the GAA president set up a new committee. It was stuffed full of party hacks from provincial councils and I did not see much chance of anything coming from them. If you are in a leading position in the provinces then you must have to sign a declaration in blood that you will protect these institutions with your life. Turkeys don’t vote for Christmas.

Now there are two proposals which will go to Central Council next week and it seems likely that they will choose one to go forward to a another Special Congress in February. These latest proposals are in their own way revolutionary as the provincial route is no longer the way into the All-Ireland championships.

If a new proposal is voted through then 2023 is the year of milk and honey as a new format will be in place. There is a lot of talk and education needed before that as the two proposals are a bit complicated.

There is the red and green. Not the red and green of Mayo but each proposal is given a colour.

The green proposal would see the League played early in the year as is, followed by a knock-out provincial championship. After that would come a round-robin Sam Maguire with four groups of four from the top 16 teams with the winner of each group going into the quarter-final and the teams in positions two and three playing off for the other quarter-final places.

For a Division 3 or 4 team to qualify for the Sam route they would have to reach a provincial final and I’m not exactly sure how the groups would be set up to solve this problem. For the other 16 who are left behind there is the Tailteann Cup with the winners also guaranteed a place with the big boys the following year. New York are included in the Tailteann Cup, presumably London are also in the mix.

Still with me? The first thing any sensible person is going say is that this sounds like an awful lot of games. You are right. A county who get to provincial and All-Ireland finals could play up to 19 competitive games. If they had to play all of them by July then the players would certainly be whacked before going back to their clubs. They would all need a holiday on the French Riviera to recuperate and they would not want to have a very demanding job either.

Anyway good luck with that proposal. There are too many games in it and there would likely be a lot of injuries as matches are pushed into a narrow time frame. It would suit the counties with big panels and Kerry, Tyrone, Dublin and Mayo do not need any extra assistance. One of them is going to win out anyway unless they are handicapped by having 13 players or opponents get a five-point start.

The red proposal, if I have not lost the dressing room already, is not radically different but has a few more redeeming features. The year would start with round-robin provincial championships. These would appear to be glorified McKenna or O’Byrne Cups but the winners get a bonus later. This is to keep Dublin, Tyrone and Kerry sharp early in the season. Not much chance of them sleeping on the job.

Anyway after that things get interesting. Divisions 1 and 2 of the League get mixed up with four each from the old Divisions 1 and 2 in together and each team then gets seven games. The top three teams in Divisions 1A and 1B would go straight into All-Ireland quarter-finals with the remaining places to be decided between the fourth placed teams and the winners of Divisions 2A and 2B. After that it is a straight shoot-out before one of the top three win it out – a bit like England and Germany where England play brilliantly and then Germany win on penalties!

The incentive to win a provincial title is an extra two points in the bag for the League section of the championship. So Kerry are guaranteed two points most years, and Dublin and Mayo or Galway. Runners-up get one point. This is the sop to the provincial championships. In Ulster the winners will certainly earn their two points.

The Tailteann Cup is again left for the others, to be played in the same format with Divisions 3 and 4 mixed up to allow some escape from the persecution visited upon them by constantly surviving or suffocating in the bowels of the fourth division.

It is easy to find flaws in this proposal too. When the last Congress was held in October one of the sticking points was that some teams from a lower division qualified for the knock-out stages while higher-ranked teams went out. That is in here as well but if you don’t incentivise lower division teams then there is no merit or justice in any of these proposals. Some delegates did not seem to realise that that is exactly what happens in the hurling championship and nobody complains.

Under the red proposal a team could play up to 17 games to win the gold medal. That is plenty but it would improve the games to training ratio, give lower-ranked teams a chance to improve themselves by playing more games at the right time of year and it would also give counties an opportunity to promote home games in April and May. And there would probably be more money for everyone at the end of it all. Yet having an All-Ireland final in July is too tight and it could be pushed back a month. Most counties will be able to go ahead with their club championships earlier than that anyway.

Again the Tailteann Cup is for the poor and needy and it is the promotion of it which will decide if this is a step in the right direction. It won’t solve all the problems but it might be a start.

The awkward uncle in the corner will continue to be the provincial championships and most reasonable people will wonder why it still has to be accommodated when it fails the trade descriptions act as it is unfit for purpose. But Rome was not built in a day and this should be seen for what it is and the suits should be given some credit. Both proposals have virtues and very many flaws but I’m certainly fighting out of the red corner on this one.