Its heading towards an AFL style 15 match regular season with a play off system at the end.
Top 2 into semi finals and 3rd v 6th & 4th v 5th in quarters.
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Hon the Rossies
The box office Connacht Championship
Go back to the old format and scheduling with All-Irelands in September with designated club weekends. Go back to 1A/1B/2A/2B in the league. Yesterday was April 9th. Nobody in the outside world cares about GAA inter-county championship at this time of the year, especially with games meaning nothing.
Gaelic football and hurling by their nature are prize fights. Something has to be on the line. The culture surrounding the games is different to League One in England. People will not turn up week after week. They pick and choose when and where to attend and when they do attend they want to roar like bears. You donât roar like a bear at a provincial championship game in April or a round robin game in May in a group where three of the four teams qualify and itâs obvious which one wonât qualify.
If people are offered a sunny Sunday afternoon in June with the promise of a prize fight, theyâll attend. If itâs April and thereâs nothing on the line, they wonât. And the games in general suffer from terrible attendances. When people see terrible attendances, they see a product that they donât want and a product that doesnât want them.
The current system has a bit of that but teams from outside the top 16 can still make the top comp if the draw falls their way like Sligo or they get a big win like Clare.
For every solution thereâs a problem but I genuinely feel this is as close as theyâre going to get. The one stumbling block, and it is a massive one, is teams and supporters taking the tailteann seriously. Westmeath winning it and celebrating it was a good start. If Everton went down and won the championship next year theyâd celebrate wildly. Gaa fans would be worried people would be laughing at them.
What was the difference between Clare v Cork yesterday and Clare v Cork in 1997?
The difference is there were people at Clare v Cork 1997. Clare v Cork yesterday was not a huge surprise. Clare reached the All-Ireland quarter-finals last year. Clare had to win yesterday to stay in the championship. But there was nobody there.
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Due to conditioning and the like the gap has grown Sid ⌠like people are already writing off getting near limerick for a few years as they are so far ahead conditioning wise âŚthey said same about Dublin footballers when they had 3 won âŚ
weaker teams will get destroyed playing against these teams as thereâs no let up , no down period âŚ
I think the problem is that the toothpaste is out of the tube now and the demands to be playing at top table are so high that the potentially best lads from weaker counties are not going to sacrifice their lives for it âŚthe old saying show me the incentive and Iâll show you the outcome âŚ
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Yesterday wasnât a giant killing by Clare.
Thatâs Corks fault not Clares.
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The nature of Gaelic football as a sport is not like hurling, itâs the sort of game where there should always be shocks, any team with a bit of application should be competitive. Louth under Mickey Harte are suddenly competitive because theyâve started taking it seriously.
But theyâre unlikely to be particularly competitive in a round robin format, because squad size will tell. They might be competitive if they were playing knockout Leinster championship.
Conditioning is an argument for making sure club championships are played during the inter-county season. Interrupt the preparations of the top teams. Donât give them a free run. Donât give them the ultra-competitive NFL Division 1. Bring the standards of the top teams down and bring the standards of the lower teams up. Go back to three subs. It would take a few years but standards would start to even out.
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I was at that game in 2005 which was part of an exceedingly attractive double-header with Wexford v Carlow. Two good games on the day. The seethe and hatred towards Graham Geraghty was a sight to behold. The young Dubs supporters were given it the âYis are nextâ treatment on the way out. The Leinster Championship was still in its halcyon days back then and Iâm grateful that I witnessed the last few years of it before it turned into a foregone conclusion. Nowadays children could never believe that in any given year you could have 5 or 6 realistic contenders for the Leinster title.
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On two separate occasions in the 2000s, 82,000 (eighty-two thousand) people paid into Croke Park to attend a Dublin v Wexford Leinster Senior Football Championship clash.
Eighty-two thousand people. One hundred and sixty-four thousand people across two separate days.
Days that were awash with sunshine, and sunburn, and money, and full hairlines, and perfect eyesight, and bottles of Club Orange, and literal fireworks, and the smell of cigarettes, and cocaine dust on cisterns, and the novelty of being on a new standing terrace, and soaking your face and head in water from the taps, and full pubs, and pints of stout, and fellas removing their tops and dancing to âIs This The Way To Amarillo?â, and Copper Face Jacks at 3am, and somewhere else at 4am.
I miss the innocence of those times. I miss the youth. I miss the positivity. I miss the sense of possibility. And the jeopardy.
The Dublin team marching arm in arm to the new Hill 16. Ciaran Whelan committing two red card offences in 60 seconds, and duly being sent off for the second.
The new new Hill 16 going stark raving mad because 14 man Dublin had made a late comeback with a goal by substitute Jason Sherlock to overcome a five point deficit to deny Wexford.
Mattie Fordeâs point to open the scoring in the 2008 Leinster final was one of those âstand on Hill 16 and feel the silence around you and listen to the rest of the stadium eruptâ moments. Sure Wexford lost by 23 points in the end, but that wasnât the point. The point was the sense of possibility. A sense of possibility which came true, because Wexford, and not Dublin, participated in one of that yearâs All-Ireland football semi-finals.
This year, we are denied the prospect of a third straight Dublin v Wexford Leinster Senior Football Championship clash in front of a crowd of two to four thousand people on a cold, grey, drizzly April Saturday evening. Thank fucking God.
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Who gives a shite about two teams that are ranked in the 18-12 range with no hope of doing anything. The only people there will be family members and a few die hards or some random tourist
How Whelan never got sent off for nearly decapitating Red Barry in that 05 game still confuses me.
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Just looking at the game today compared to the mid to late 00âs @Cheasty. Iâve made a list of which teams I would rank as being in better shape than 15 years ago and which would be weaker overall. The perception is that similar to international football, a large percentage of teams arenât at the same standard of old. Weâll take 2004- 2008 as the bench mark but in reality the decline for Leinster football had set in before the end of that period.
Stronger in 2004-2008 period:
Laois (far stronger)
Wexford (far stronger)
Westmeath
Kildare
Meath (starting to wane though despite the 07â semi),
Carlow ( I would say marginally stronger around 2005 and they did reach a Leinster minor final in 07â)
Wicklow (Flying by 2008 under Micko. Marginally better than now).
Offaly
Longford
Cork (Far stronger)
Limerick (Far stronger)
Sligo (Far stronger)
Fermanagh (Far stronger)
Armagh (tail end of the greatest Armagh team of all-time)
Tyrone (Still strong now but had a generational team then)
Down
Antrim (Marginally stronger back then, reached an Ulster Final in 2009)
Kilkenny (They actually competed in a Div 4 league campaign back around 2008 iirc)
Stronger in the 2020âs:
Cavan
Monaghan (Margin call given their run in 2007 but in general theyâre more consistent now)
New York
London
Clare
Mayo
Galway
Roscommon
Dublin
Around the same level:
Kerry
Louth
Derry (They reached an AI semi in 04â and won Div 1 in 2008. Dumped Tyrone out too around 2006)
Tipp (Would have been in the stronger category in 2020 but dipped in the last 2 years. Tommy Murphy Cup champions in 2005 we must remember)
Waterford
Leitrim
Donegal (Slightly better nowadays but a bit of a rabble by their standards this year)
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I heard an interview of the two New York native brothers who played the match on Saturday night. Mental accents.
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I had no idea that the Football Championship got underway this weekend, until I finally got around to flicking through the sports section of todayâs Paper of Record an hour ago. 6 counties gone from the race from Sam Maguire on Easter Sunday, 9 April.
I had no idea either about these structural changes. After the roaring success of the Super 8âs, what a superb idea to double down on it with a Super Sweet 16.
@peddlerscross could you please keep us posted on the Box Office Industries Discover Ireland Challenge Match Circuit over the next seven weeks. It should be a bumper period for the circuit and Iâll be particularly interested to see what Mayo get up to.
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Iâll try my best.
In a way it would have been better if Roscommon lost as they are absolute titans of the circuit as @RedHandHuns will testify.
Tessio had them playing everyone like Kerry in Mallow and all these kind of random places over the last few years.
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There will surely be a Cork v Mayo clash coming to a pitch near somebody very soon.
Somewhere in the south-east Clare region seems like a likely venue.
Cratloe or Broadford* or Newmarket On-Fergus, maybe.
*Once referred to here as The Killing Fields.
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Roscommon are probably your stereotypical âyardstickâ, âinoffensiveâ team perfectly suited to the Box Office Industries Challenge Match Circuit.
Dublin fulfill this role in hurling.
A team like Armagh or Tyrone are very much to be avoided as Davey Byrne of Ballymun Kickhams will testify.
Kerry will be mad for a few challenges to keep them sharp during the Munster Championship. Youâd wonder would Jack OâConnor pick up the phone to McStay.
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