Normally we write about sport we watched over the weekend but we have to make an exception here and focus on the one that we didn’t – and few others bothered to either.
If ever there was a red flag to signal the public’s apathy to the new football championship format it was the pitiful sight of all those empty seats and terraces in Croke Park last Saturday evening as the best team in the country kicked off the defence of their All-Ireland title against a fellow Division One team that had been the one side to get a result against them in last year’s championship.
It was the fourth time Roscommon and Dublin have faced each other in the championship in Croke Park over the past six years. In 2018 they played a dead-rubber in the last round of the inaugural Super 8s yet still more than 33,000 were there to see basically a second Dublin XV win by 14 points. The following year over 36,000 took in another facile Dublin win in the Super 8s.
Last year then, maybe out of a curiosity to check out this new Sam Maguire format, there was again a crowd of over 30,000 (30,802 to be precise) to witness Davy Burke’s side memorably or notoriously play keep ball for six minutes on their way to carving out a draw.
Twelve months on though and there wasn’t even half that crowd – 13,000 at best – as the Dubs opened their Sam Maguire group against same opposition.
Granted, there was quite a bit else fighting for the attention and affection of the Dublin and wider public last Saturday.
Soccer remains the city’s biggest sport, if no longer its most celebrated, and it happened to have a fixture involving two clubs which native sons like Giles, McGrath, Stapleton and Quinn once graced and tens of thousands now support.
Another team from the city was playing in the biggest game of the European rugby club calendar.
That though doesn’t explain or excuse the dismal crowd for the visit of Roscommon. Precisely two years earlier another Saturday evening game featuring the Dubs – a Leinster final against Kildare – clashed with Leinster playing in a Champions Cup final yet still over 33,000 saw Dessie Farrell’s side make light work of Glenn Ryan’s.
After how pedestrian winning Leinsters have long become for Dublin, last Saturday was supposed to signal the start of the real business. It’s why in 2018 when Dublin and Roscommon were on the same double bill for their opening games of the Super 8s more than 53,000 were in Croker.
In 2019 when we were down in Killarney, making a weekend of the Kerry-Mayo Super 8s opener, we and thousands of others in the town on the Saturday night watched on a big screen Dublin take on Cork in a shootout. There was more than 30,000 in Croker for that game, just as there would be in Fitzgerald Stadium the following day. That weekend in Killarney, there was a sense of being part of a carnival, a festival of football. Now, outside of Clones on Ulster final day, when are we supposed to have that same feeling?
The powers-that-be will both hope and answer that it’ll be the last-round of the Sam Maguire group stages; that we’ll get something similar to last year when so many permutations were at play while Shane Walsh, Aidan O’Shea, John Heslin and Kevin Feely stood over those free kicks at the posts.
That though isn’t quite good or soon enough. Championship, even in a diluted form, is meant to mean more than what we’ve had this past fortnight. And it is always meant to mean more and be bigger than the league, again at least in the estimation of the public.
In the 2017 national league Dublin played Roscommon in Croke Park. It was on a typically, bitterly cold February Saturday evening. It was typically one-sided: Dublin, stretching their unbeaten run in league and championship to a historic 35 games, won by 21 points. And yet there was 20,500 at it – an estimated 8,000 more than what was at the championship last Saturday.
Like last Saturday, there wasn’t an official figure given for Dublin’s opening game of this year’s league against Monaghan, or the following home game against Roscommon, but they weren’t considerably smaller, if smaller at all, than what was in Croke Park last Saturday.
It’s not just a Dublin thing. Mayo drew 9,200 to their opening group game in Castlebar against Cavan, just 600 people more than when the counties last played in the league there back in 2017 – and less than their three home league games this year (against Dublin, Roscommon and Derry). Mayo’s previous home game in this new format – against Louth last year – drew 11,347, again less than all but one of their four home league games that season.
Kerry’s one and only home game of the Sam Maguire phase, against Monaghan, drew just a little over 8,000, again smaller than their average home crowd in the league.
The same day I, along with 3,261 others, took in the Clare-Cork game in Ennis, a game that would go a long way to deciding who wouldn’t make it out of that group. It was only 400 fewer than what took in last year’s Munster championship game between the same teams at the same venue – but only 500 fewer than what attended a league game between them there.
Even the match of the day – Galway and Derry – drew only 7,500 to Salthill. Outside of Donegal as Ulster champions hosting Tyrone, where 16,600 flocked to Ballybofey, and the format just hasn’t captured the public’s imagination or footfall.
It’s obvious why. The J word. Just not enough is at stake with three teams out of four making it out of the group. The teams themselves might be vying to get as top a seed as possible to get a rest weekend or home advantage come the preliminary quarter-final round, but such nuances are just too abstract or academic to a public reared on championship being some more elemental and immediate.
Intuitively it can tell the competitiveness or even integrity of the championship has been diluted; if the structure enforces eight of its last 12 teams to play three games in 14 days then it is inherently sabotaging their chances of advancing to the All Ireland semi-final – and more seriously compromising player welfare by greatly increasing the risk of injury.
This format was to be trialled for three years but it will need to be adjusted for year three. Maybe it will be in the form of the most obvious tweak: only the top two sides advance to the quarter-finals. To minimise dead rubbers and reward the team that finishes top of a group ahead of one that came second they can be given a home All-Ireland quarter-final.
Or, if you want to ensure third is rewarded for not finishing fourth, bring in a relegation playoff: let the championship, not the league, be the primary judge of who plays in it the following year. That’d be enough jeopardy for everyone.
Right now though, as Denis Walsh masterfully put it at the weekend, the football championship resembles a game of billiards being played at a stately pace. That’s no good for anyone
