GAA should have been left well enough alone

By John Fogarty

IT didn’t have to be this way. It shouldn’t have had to be this way. The Allianz Leagues as they were played this year were fine as they were.

But by a combination of accident and design, the GAA have weakened their second biggest competition to the extent that February is set to become a dead inter-county month.

As today’s Irish Examiner reveals, GAA chiefs are now considering starting the five-game Allianz Hurling League proper in March. That means the All-Ireland club semi-finals might be the only serious hurling played next February.

But football also faces a similar predicament as teams in Division 1 can afford to lose as many as four of their seven games and still reach a league semi-final.

Unlike before where the top two reached the decider, the parameters of success have been extended to four.

That means the top teams can coax themselves gently into the league next February safe in the knowledge that they can afford to lose a couple of games and make up for it along the way.

Consequently, Division 1 managers will experiment more with their line-ups, depriving supporters of the star-studded teams they have come to expect over the last couple of years when the division was ultra-competitive and a real platform to the championship (Cork’s All-Ireland last year and Kerry’s in 2009 were preceded by Division 1 titles).

Dublin manager Pat Gilroy has another reason for describing league semi-finals as “a bit of a farce”.

As he said about them back in April: “It kind of makes the league a bit of a strange thing, that, in the middle of the last game you could be making a semi-final if you win by two points or be relegated if you lose by two.

“You have four teams on top and two on the bottom so there are only two teams in the middle and I think it makes a bit of a farce of the league because the team that is fourth could have five points in the league and still win the league.”

Of course, Central Council’s decision to bring back league semi-finals, which was facilitated by a successful motion at Congress, would have been more conducive with the Central Competition Control Committee’s (CCCC) proposals to make Division 1 and 2 16-team divisions split into groups of eight.

This blog last week highlighted the shortcomings of those recommendations. Still, they were surprisingly shot down by Central Council. And yet they would have been a better fit than what we have now.

We repeat – what exactly was wrong with this year’s Allianz Football League? We know the reason why league semi-finals were re-introduced. There were too many dead rubbers in the final round of last year’s competition (and hurling as well) but did they really require such surgery?

If after one season Central Council felt moved to do something about an anomaly in the system why didn’t they do something about last year when the four provincial champions were dumped out at the quarter-final stage?

They didn’t because they rightly recognised it as a freak occurrence. What happened in the league last year, which they failed to recognise, were the symptoms of a system that was still settling.

At the time, the four division system, after its re-birth in 2008, was in its infancy.

It was this year that it matured, providing us with four competitive divisions, especially in Division 2 and Division 3, and with just one game of no consequence come final round day.

Just like the football equivalent, the Allianz Hurling League wasn’t broken. It didn’t need fixing. Clare and Limerick were where they were last year because they weren’t good enough. Clare remain there because they haven’t been good enough to get out of there in two years.

Division 1, reduced to six teams, will certainly be cutthroat competitive – when it eventually gets going.

That’s the thing - for a sport that is continually in need of promotion, it seems downright silly to reduce the number of its top level games.

The less is more argument won’t wash. Yes, hurling’s top table has four short sides at most but Dublin have demonstrated this year that the glass ceiling can be broken. Smashed, even, in the early half of the year. Division 2 champions Limerick should not have been deprived the opportunity to play in the top-flight.

After what can only be described as the most successful football and league campaigns in recent years, we’re facing into an uncertain one next year.

And for what? To facilitate once-strong hurling counties who have failed themselves as opposed to the system failing them? To avoid an unseasonal glut of dead rubbers happening again in the football competition?

The knives are already out for the new structure in some traditional hurling counties while supporters will vote with their feet in the Allianz Football League Division 1 if they suss their team isn’t taking the competition all that seriously.

Well should have been left well enough alone.

Source: http://feeds.examiner.ie/~r/iesportsblog/~3/OJZMQ_No7qQ/post.aspx

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