Seán Moran: Striking a balance and other notes from a troubled championship

It may have been John Waters who explains in the Horslips documentary, Return of the Dancehall Sweethearts, that when it was known that the band would be heading through town, on the road to some concert, groups of youths would gather on the street to slouch and wait for them to arrive.

The Land Rover duly appeared and zoomed past with a few perfunctory waves and then everyone would go home.

A bit like the championship this year.

It’s too rushed. Needs space to breathe.

Brian Ó Beaglaoich back in a good place as Kerry show ‘serious depth’

---

Dublin make their move but mystery of Derry’s whereabouts deepens

---

Clare and Galway advance to All-Ireland minor hurling semi-finals

---

Donegal left to ponder a more arduous route to Croke Park after Cork defeat

---

Time has been of the essence to one of the recurrent grievances. The scheduling of the championship is too fast and densely packed with impacts on spectators and the optimal promotion of the games.

The structure creaks because it is designed to do so many things. We need a tighter calendar to allow clubs more room to breathe but we need an expanded fixture list to provide more matches for players who train intensely for a season that used to last potentially one match.

As a result the impression is created of a speeded-up carousel.

Little wonder that no one can catch breath and supporters can’t always be bothered to attend every day or that the build-up to specific matches can be hurried and consequently fleeting.

It might cause inconvenience to spectators and curtail the promotional window but that’s a balance that had to be struck. Players in general favour the new system.

Fixtures are meaningless. No one dies.

There is the great theme of this year’s football championship – jeopardy. It exists only in the broadest sense with three teams qualifying from each four-team group but what it did do was create more sudden-death fixtures on the other side.

Three of the four frequently derided preliminary quarter-finals ended up as one-point contests.

It is possible that each group may be reduced to two instead of three qualifiers but that raises the other great spectre, the dead rubber. GAA history contains plenty of examples of alternating solutions – one being implemented until its shortcomings start to wear people out followed by the other, which provides relief until its deficiencies are also deemed insupportable.

Into this rapidly-running narrative are inserted four provincial championships, two intercounty competitions with rapid-fire round-robin matches a potential four knock-out rounds.

The shop window. What about the shop window?

When the cry goes up that promotion is suffering, the obvious question is promotion of what – if not the games throughout the association?

There is now a strong feeling, as expressed in countless task force reports and Congress motions that the GAA needs to be reoriented towards the vast majority of its players, who at local level want nothing more exotic than a fixtures schedule, which facilitates the planning of their lives.

Opponents of this new sensibility make the argument that by a certain stage, there are only a handful of counties left involved in championships so that impact is restricted but the problem is that you don’t always know their likely identity. We all saw in the past how an unexpected run for a team could culminate in its club fixtures being postponed sine die.

Clearing the decks by the end of July has taken those clashes off the table.

The GAA is of a mind that the optimisation of club schedules is worth losing some of the benefits of a longer-running intercounty season. If that balance gets upset – by a major impact on revenue, for instance – then something will be done to address it.

Time running out?

At the moment we are just after year one of a three-year trial. Downstream effects will be analysed and tweaks implemented. There appears little possibility of radical alteration. Players, clubs and many county boards can see the benefits. There is virtually no possibility of September All-Irelands returning.

The provincial championships also look in trouble. Artificially boosting their status with live televising of the finals has led to aghast viewing on the scale of Roman Roy’s rocket launch in Succession.

It may be time to allow the provincial finals to go to the market place and get picked up if there’s sufficient interest, as with Ulster this year, which always looked promising and generally is.

The provincial championships have had their day in the sense that they are no longer necessary for the pursuit of the All-Ireland and also that their previous function of encouraging counties with the more realistic prospect of localised success no longer applies as competitiveness has become so compromised.

Persuading counties to see the benefit in graded competition has gone quite well in the two years to date of the Tailteann Cup. That should be the focus and quite possibly with another tier added. In GAA history, plenty of counties didn’t even enter the provincial championships because they felt they weren’t up to the standard and regraded.

Never mind the quality?

Restrict hand passing? Force restarts to go long? The clamour about the tedium of modern football did not abate this year. How far will the GAA go to re-engineer the game and in accordance with whose preferences.

Ten years ago, the Football Review Committee felt that it was too soon to say whether hand passing had gone beyond a tactic, which varied according to preference, and become the equivalent of invasive knotweed.

The Standing Committee on Playing Rules continues to monitor the situation but it has become evident that rising levels of hand passing are further and further hardening football into a possession game with declining levels of contest for the ball.

Maybe it’s time for a review of how people believe football should be played and if there’s a happy medium between fixed position play and 14 outfield contests and the amorphous movement of 28 players up and down the field in search of one-on-ones or turnovers.

Next year?

We go again.

e: sean.moran@irishtimes.com