I sort of agree with you. If there were only two qualification spots, a lot of games that had something on the line over the weekend just gone would have been complete dead rubbers. It was actually quite a decent weekend of football as it turned out. But bar the Galway-Armagh and Dublin-Mayo games, these games were the equivalents of trees falling in a forest with nobody around.
And three qualification spots means the first two rounds are turgid shite.
The bye week for the group winners means the quarter finals are also likely to be turgid shite, as they were last year.
If you have two qualification spots only, you would have to tweak the fixtures so that the teams that win in the first round of fixtures meet each other in the second round. Otherwise you’ll end up with a load of dead rubbers in the third round.
And still, none of this will be appealing to spectators.
Mayo derry is a big one. If derry play like the last few matches mayo will surely win. But as some pundit said, maybe this is the big game derry need to kick-start their season again.
Galway will surely beat monaghan at home.
People want both league to effect championship and the provincials to be retained and this is the only way of doing that.
Oisin on the GAA social agrees with that this is best format. Says people are only realising the ‘jeopardy’ after the matches as they see how important finishing in the different positions were. Also that if people want ‘jeopardy’ the whole way through thats back to straight knock out and whole thing over in a month. They definitely have fluked upon the best system it just needs time to bed in and, crucially, fans to realise if they actually support the team and sport that this is the way it is and go to the one or two fucking Championship games they have per year.
Why does this keep being said? I have never heard of anybody in the real world who expressed the view that the League needed to or should be linked to the championship.
It seems to me that it is an astro-turf imposition from suits which gains momentum the way every other shit piece of “progress” in the GAA does, through gobshites in media promoting it and sheep going along with it unthinkingly.
It reminds me of the golfers who went to LIV claiming that the public were crying out for more “team” golf, rather than the the “team” element of LIV being an obvious intelligence insulting gimmick dreamt up by some know nothing Americans with morkeshing degrees.
There was an element of intrigue with the final round of fixtures the weekend just gone.
But that’s not jeopardy. And people are so ground down by the sea of mostly pointless football over the previous two rounds and since April that they are numb to it all and have no real passion for it.
It’s a demonstrably terrible format and those who defend it are telling the public that they are stupid because they don’t like the stupid format.
I wonder would it be worth reducing it to 12 teams - 4 groups of 3 - every team gets one home and one away game. If you structure it right then the final round will always act as a knockout game.
4 provincial winners and 8 sides from the qualifiers to make the 12. 12 in tier 2/tailtainn cup and 8 in tier 3.
Rank them 1-16 so you have four seeding pools teams ranked 1-4, teams ranked 5-8, teams ranked 9-12 and then teams ranked 13-16.
You have four ties between the teams in the 1-4 bracket and the teams in the 5-8 bracket. The winners of these ties qualify for the All-Ireland quarter finals and the losers get a second chance.
You have four ties between the teams in the 9-12 bracket and the teams in the 13-16 bracket.
The losers of these ties are eliminated while the winners of these ties progress to meet the losers of the ties between the 1-4 v 5-8 brackets.
The winners of those ties then qualify for the quarter finals.
In this system, every game is either straight knockout and/or one in which the winner qualifies for the quarter-finals. No dead rubbers or low stakes games.
There’s certainly no alternative that wouldnt have at least as many flaws as this one. We live in an imperfect gaa world. The AFL system sounds like an absolute dogs dinner but seems to work. And yes I know GAA isn’t the same bla bla bla but that’s just the point it’s a weird weird set up with clubs, underage, massive differences in population, hurling, club dual players, amateur status ruling out weekday matches etc etc. There is simply no even close to perfect system.
That’s not bad actually, how would you seed them?. If fans actually cared though each team having a home championship match for children to go to etc is actually a reasonable ambition. As Oisin said name one match in the whole round robin that meant absolutely nothing. There wasn’t one. That’s fair going
Of course there isn’t and that’s what I’ve been saying for years - but the GAA think there is a perfect system - egged on by the Newstalk Generation demanding a fantasy Premier League of Dublin and Mayo and Kerry playing against each other each every week - and their “perfect” rationalisation has been a disaster.
AFL has all sorts of redistributive mechanisms which mean that a league can be a real basis for a hugely competitive competition. AFL is based on clubs, not counties, which means it’s inherently more equal. Look at the AFL ladder, there’s sod all between 2nd place and 13th. This weekend you had the team that is rock bottom of the ladder go 50 points ahead of the reigning premiers before losing by one point in an all time classic game.
When you have a representative system which in which inequality is built in - as it is inter-county GAA, as it is in international association football and rugby, the knock out tie rules supreme. The more you focus on a league system, the greater the predictabilty will be.
Look at the disenchantment with the Irish international football team now. We don’t contend in qualifying groups any more and people are completely fucked off with the whole thing, it’s dying a death, people aren’t interested in going to games.
If the GAA ran Ye Olde FA Cup, they’d probably have abolished knock out ties in favour of a round robin system. Who needs Bristol City v Liverpool or Wrexham v Arsenal or Bournemouth v Man Utd and the chance of a shock, when you could have a round robin group with:
Liverpool
Bristol City
Doncaster Rovers
Halifax Town
