Eire moved their domestic soccer league from the traditional European soccer season August to May to February to November. I donāt think Paddy Footix bothered with it in either format. A League of Ireland soccer man like @Little_Lord_Fauntleroy and a rugby man like @Tim_Riggins immediately get it though as to what utter nonsense the GAA split season is.
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Interesting waning in the games, participation levels down, clubs folding, games not on tv and attendances down.
Letās start the club championships in the middle of holiday season.
Just watch the 17-19 year olds disappear.
The geographical thing is a big deal. Little in the way of local rivalry. A pervasive negativity. Supporters do not travel to away fixtures and home supporters are not exercised about opposition. It has a Celtic League vibe. If people arenāt exercised about rivalries, children arenāt that exercised about growing up to play for these teams. At least when Wexford were getting tanked in the 2000s by Kilkenny they lost only once, and there was a more plausible route through the back door. Now the best they can hope for is to somehow scramble enough points to finish ahead of Dublin, maybe with a fake win over a Kilkenny team who arenāt trying, before an inevitable defeat by a team primed by an ultra-competitive Munster championship. Thereās a fierce bang of those Welsh rugby regions off the also-ran Leinster counties now.
Name some clubs who have folded?
Not the finals though. Thatās your big ticket event and it had carved out a time that it would be both well attended and get a good rating.
With the February to November League of Ireland season, Iāve always found the February to May part the most interesting because those are traditional association football club season months. Then I completely zone out until about the start of October, when I look in again to see if thereās a title race on.
Bohs v Rovers on a cold February Friday night at Dalymount Park seems an attractive proposition. Rovers v Bohs on a July Sunday lunchtime at Tallaght seems irrelevant.
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We played 7 club hurling championship games last year. 5 group matches, a quarter final and semi final. First one was at the very end of July and through to being knocked out in early October time roughly. All games, fortunately, were played in good weather and all involved knew the dates months in advance. Worked like clock work, regular games for club players. A couple of lads were on the J1 and missed the first couple of matches but so be it - nearly every club was in the same boat. Club football matches thrown in too for dual players.
Give me this system over what went on before. Two games in a week in March/April and then a 5 or 6 month gap waiting for the county team to get knocked out. Couldnāt plan, no idea of where or when matches would be played.
This current system aināt perfect, hurling championship should run through from May Bank Holiday weekend to mid August, but itās a vast, vast improvement on what went before. Ask anyone involved with a club whether senior, intermediate or junior and Iād be confident the majority would stay the same.
Senior intercounty is not the be all and end all. Lads moaning nonstop because it clashes with other sports should get involved with their local club rather than bitching to beat the band.
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Iād say yeād refix them if needed all the same.
We would squeeze them in alright!
Interesting point. Meaningful league action is key. Covid obviously involved temporary alterations but the Kilkenny structure offers five highly meaningful league ties for each of the 12 clubs at Senior and at Intermediate. Then there is knockout championship, where four of the clubs in both grades will be gone after a first round encounter. Two of the losers in that first round will then play a relegation final after a short break ā a fortnight, typically.
Have VM (neƩ TV3) expressed any interest in getting TV rights for GAA? It might not be value for money for them.
They focus on rugby and football now. They want big ticket items that they donāt have to pay for all of the production for either.
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That would be my take on it. I canāt see them taking the risk on GAA.
People need to realize hurling has always been in crisis. Poor Dublin-Wexford hurling matches: not a phenomenon that started in the 2020s. Limerick are remarkably strong are the moment. But you would still say five other counties at the moment ā Clare, Cork, Galway, Kilkenny and Tipperary ā are a credible contender for the Liam MacCarthy Cup.
Taken in historical perspective, six contenders in hurling is well up towards the highest end of this register. The fact that those six counties possess around 85% of all Senior titles won so far tells a truth. A Team Ulster and/or a Team Midlands (never going to happen, in any case) would not make a whit of a difference. Bar freakish convergences of talent, such as we saw in the 1990s, there will never be more than six credible contenders and a lot of the time there will be fewer than six such contenders.
The historical record should school a certain measure of realism. There is also the factor that other counties ā via the Joe McDonagh Cup, the Christy Ring Cup, the Nickey Rackard Cup and the Lory Meagher Cup ā enjoy meaningful championship action in a manner largely unknown before 21st century structures. There is a sense in which hurling, if we leave aside dissatisfaction with current styles of play, has never been in a healthier place.
Some version of the split season is here to stay. The main problem is the round robin provincial format (and the mystique, less obviously, around the Munster Championship). There should be a return to the earlier structure, with second chance via back door. Or a move ā preferably, in my view ā to an open draw involving ten teams and two groups of five.
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That sums it up nicely.
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Thanks. I think hurling history should put certain matters in perspective.
Kildare is likely the county with best chance of becoming in time a possible top pier competitor.
If Tipp or Cork were to somehow beat Limerick and knock them out then we would probably have the most wide open championship since 2018 and 2013 before that.
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I think that point is an excellent one.
My impression of TV3, and always has been since the start, is that theyāre a lowest common denominator channel which just buys in ITV stuff and repeats it, with little home produced programming of note. They have Ireland AM and they have the programme formerly known as Tonight With Vincent Browne and thatās it. My impression of them is they have little or no commitment to genuinely reflecting Irish life or culture in the way RTE does, and that theyāre essentially aiming at soft Brexiteer housewives and white van men in Stoke or Derby or Wolverhampton rather than real people in Ireland. Maybe as a commercial enterprise that works for them and theyāre happy with that, but they shouldnāt complain when people completely rubbish them as channel.
If they covered GAA, as they did before, it at least would show they arenāt purely aiming at Irish Sun readers and would improve the visibility and image of the channel in general.
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A club season going from Feb to the august bank holiday would be unreal with a knock out inter county championship from mid august to early October would be tremendous.
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