Flesh that out a bit. Iām genuinely interested
And when the inter county season begins to roll into the September do you think thatāll happen?
Anybody playing inter county football will be fucked before the club championship kicks off.
Youād Sean Finn doing his acl which is linked to fatigue and wonāt play for his club this year.
Maybe if he wasnāt asked to play two high intensity games within six days of each other he wouldnāt be crocked.
Thatās the next move from the inter county games. We want the games better spaced out.
Putting your biggest fixtures on when half the country is on holidays is thick. September was ideal for visibility.
As @Cheasty has pointed out here any number of times and Donal Og did last night, Hurling and the GAA in general had a window in the sporting calendar pretty much all to itself from late May through to early September. All the big games were shown as there was little other sport on.
You move out of your window and you find that television stations are not all that interested in your niche sport of hurling, which to large swathes of the island of Ireland is viewed as as a quirky minority sport akin to shinty, lacrosse or curling.
The GAA is only a pastime as well and not a professional sport. Broadcasters will inevitably opt for a global sport like rugby, and a big South African Northern Transvaal v Western Province, Currie Cup clash, or a Scotland v Ireland, Wooden Spoon decider in the Ladies Six Nations or even Paddington The Bear over local rivalries like Clare v Limerick or Cork v Tipperary.
Paddy GAA fan needs to wisen up to the fact that if heās going to have his split season and move the inter-county Championships to a spring challenge mini blitz format that heās giving up the competitive advantage he had in the summer as regards unfettered live television coverage.
It would be a bit like @Fitzy arriving home from Australia for Christmas and complaining that the weather is very cold and wondering why he canāt eat his Christmas Turkey on Curracloe beach.
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RTE and TV3 between them should easily be able to carry four live games per weekend.
Maybe give RTE a 5pm Saturday game and TV3 a 7pm Saturday game with the two live games remaining on RTE on the Sunday.
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agree with pretty much all of that
All games bar the 2 All Ireland finals and maybe 1 football semi were already played in peak holiday season in Ireland. They have always been summer sports
Iāve asked this question previously. Few people want to answer it. I donāt believe a club should be guaranteed any more than 3 games in a championship at most. Iād be of the view that Tyrone have it right - they take their 15 game league very seriously, it feeds into the championship but the the championship is pure knockout, and itās the best one in Ireland.
And wise up to the fact the inter county games are a huge help in getting and retaining kids interest.
August is peak holiday month in Ireland which is when the club championships now kick off.
It would be incredibly expensive for the GAA to fund the streaming of all games without charging for GAA Go. The panel, the camera operators, director, sound engineers etc etc etc.
In order to do so free to air they would have to sell adds, but then they would need to start a whole TV add sales department from scratch.
Even at that they would need mutiple TV channels as many games are on at the same time.
GAA TV, if it comes, will need to be behind a paywall as well.
Yes and the club player has a fixture plan now provided at the start of the year to allow them to plan their holidays accordingly
Thatās little to do with the format itself though, itās a shambles because of the paucity of quality in the group right now. Leinster was a shambles in the 2000s too when nobody was within an asses roar of Kilkenny. It was very exciting in the round robin era in 2019 when Galway were gone in the group stage and Wexford won their first title in 15 years.
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Club games were always played in August, the only difference now is that you can actually plan around them
No I understand that they have to charge for it. I just think it has to be as easy as paying your subscription and then turning on the TV and its there
A lot of people are tied into August holidays. August is peak holiday season. Split season zealot @the_man_himself was even advocating here last year that families take their kids out of school to go on holidays in June in readiness for the big club season kick off in the month of August.
There is no way to pay for something on Saorview at the moment though, it could be done through the Sky box or whatever alright.
Has any other major sporting organisation ever permanently shifted its major fixtures to a different time window in the year like this?
Like, could you imagine if the NFL decided the Superbowl would be played in November or the October Classic of World Series baseball moved to July? Or the AFL Grand Final moved to December?
Rugby League might be the best comparison I can think of when they moved to summer. I lost pretty much all interest in that sport after that. Rugby League in England used to have a good platform with regular live games on Saturday afternoons on BBC1 through the winter, and the Challenge Cup final at the end of April/early May wasnāt that far off the FA Cup in terms of the national exposure it gave the game. Ashes Series were a big deal. All that ended when Super League came along. The game sold its soul.
Club action had already probably started in the 95% of counties that had been knocked out of the championship by August under the old format. The only difference now is that you have actual dates at the start of the year to plan around. Before, you could have a holiday planned and the CCCC in whichever county would go off an organise a championship fixture with 2 weeks notice.
Are schools open in July now?