While I promised myself to avoid howling at the moon about Championship structures this summer it is hard to avoid the issue with the current format. Right now interest in the football championship is low as it trudges along at a snails pace. Which is a shame.
The attendance in Croke Park for the Dublin-Roscommon match last weekend is surely a canary in the coal mine for the powers that be. I am an optimist by nature but it was stark and impossible to argue with. There was treble that attendance (11,167) at the dead rubber Super 8 game in 2018 between the same counties.
Think about that for a second. The combined attendances of Dublin’s four championship matches this summer wouldn’t fill Croke Park once. It didn’t appear as bad on television in Killarney a week previously as Kerry took on Monaghan in their first group game, but it was just as bad. That was the last time Kerry will play at home until next February (unless things take an unlikely turn and they end up hosting a preliminary quarter-final) yet a mere 8,000 supporters were present.
There will be as many, and more, at a league game in the freezing cold and pouring rain next spring. The stand in Tralee’s Austin Stack Park will be full two hours before throw in and the air will be crackling with anticipation. The apathy with which the championship is being viewed now is clear when full rounds of county leagues are taking place the same evening as a home championship match, as happens in some counties.
Many of the volunteers and players involved in those club games are the people that would be attending the matches. But they are otherwise engaged. The following day, Kerry’s U20s were playing in the All-Ireland final in Portlaoise. Only the true die hards were going to attend both, with a county league game thrown in for good measure.
See this is the thing. The split season is a great concept but in practice it is a major challenge. I am a fan of the benefits but one point that I feel is lost in translation is the fact the split-season doesn’t exist at club level. It is an inter-county only phenomenon.
Certainly for the club player in Kerry. They are spoiled with the amount of games that they have from January to December. In January the district leagues kick off, followed in March by county league, club championship in August, county and club championship in September and October and finally district championships in November and December. The split season in Kerry applies to the championships and that’s it. If a player is playing hurling, or indeed any other sport, there is zero downtime. There is no such thing as a split season. It is a year round season. There is little space for supporting the county team.
It is a shame that club players can’t go to the games to proudly support their teammates and friends that are representing Kerry. Traditionally, this would always have been the case. For that Monaghan game in Killarney, An Ghaeltacht were playing an important Division One league game against Ballymac in Gallarus that Saturday evening. It simply wasn’t practical for the Gaeltacht lads to support Brian Ó Beaglaoich in Fitzgerald Stadium.
This is the schedule that the Kerry players are dropped back into once their inter-county season concludes. I know from talking to some of them that they prefer it this way. It allows them to totally focus on Kerry for the first half of the year, and then dedicate themselves completely to their clubs for the rest of the year. The players lining out with successful clubs continue deep into the winter. I’m not sure about the longterm sustainability of this, both mentally and physically. It is possible to do it for a couple of seasons but for amateur players doing that year in year out is strenuous, to the extreme.
Breaks need to be built in for the players going year round by both club and county and I know that they are. But even when they are on a break they are thinking about being back in, about their fitness levels. It is human nature.
Last Saturday in Croke Park was the start of the All-Ireland series for the All-Ireland champions. It should have been an occasion, rather than the non-event it turned out to be. It was a decent match but the attendance and the palpable indifference meant there was only going to be one story. Jack O’Connor had described the All-Ireland series as the start of the real championship post-Munster Final. Someone forgot to tell the supporters. And the general public. The promotion around the championship is conspicuous by its absence. The tagline for this years championship is “experience the unforgettable.”
Unfortunately the energy around the championship means that the opposite is the case. Our blue riband competition has a feeling of someone somewhere just wants to get it over with. Blitz through it and get it out of the way. That is wrong. It’s like scrolling on social media. Instant information but forgotten tout de suite. Certainly not unforgettable.
In the modern world of communication we should be anticipating the upcoming matches, marvelling at the skill and fitness of our heroes. Instead it feels as if it’s all happening at 2x speed. One set of matches are barely played and we are looking to the following weekend’s crowded schedule. We need gaps to get us excited. It gives us time to digest one set of contests before looking forward to the next game.
That insouciance is obvious in Kerry at the moment. Time was it was impossible to walk down the street the week of a championship game without being stopped a couple of times to discuss the upcoming game. There was a tangible difference between the early season stuff and the championship. Kerry people lived for the championship. There was a collective quickening of the step. This week many people even seem to be unaware Kerry are playing their second game of the round robin in Navan on Sunday. Most of the people I met are talking about something else.
Anything else.
As I have written in the past the main problem with the group stages of the All-Ireland series is the amount of matches that lack genuine jeopardy. Twenty four games to eliminate four teams is daft. There are too many games in too short a time frame without enough on the line. Incredibly, it is possible to lose three games in the championship and still survive. That ain’t Championship. I understand the reasoning, to avoid dead rubber matches on the last day of the group stages as happened with the Super 8s.
Unfortunately this over-correction means that the first two games almost feel like the dead rubbers that they were trying to avoid. Only two teams should emerge from the groups. The round one winners should play each other in round two and similarly the two teams defeated in round one should play each other in round two. This would reduce the likelihood of dead rubbers in the final game significantly.
As a further incentive, if considered necessary, award a home quarter-final to the group winners. There would be significance attached to every match from the off. It would be more like the Munster hurling championship in terms of excitement and contests. As is stands it very hard to get knocked out. Championship isn’t meant to be like that. A volte face is required. Courage and flexibility as opposed to stubbornness are necessary.
While the results of the games this weekend won’t decide much, they will start to set the tone of what is to come. Of all the matches the one in Derry city Sunday could be the one that will have the biggest bearing on the shape of the championship going forward. Both Derry and Armagh will probably survive into the knockout stages but if Derry are to lose again, for the third time in a row and at home they are dead men walking.
They have a look of a team on life support but a big home win can change their current trajectory and put them back on the right path. Similarly Armagh are continuing their rehabilitation, which a win accelerates and defeat will cause a relapse.
In other news, I expect Cork to test Donegal at Páirc Uí Rinn with the Ulster champions superior fitness levels proving to be the difference in the end, Roscommon to seriously gut-check and possibly beat Mayo and Kerry to break their goal-scoring duck with a few in Navan.
