Well, there is a lot of truth in that observation. Yet you also have the fact that the lower tier counties were never better catered for than at the moment, via the JMcD, CR, NR and LM Cups. Not everyone can hurl Liam MacCarthy and there is nothing to say in over 130 years of GAA history that this scenario is even remotely realistic. By far the biggest problem for hurlingâs progress â and the game has progressed quite a lot in the 21st century â is anti hurling people in football counties.
The hurling county that maybe most slipped in the last 25 to 30 years is Roscommon.
The GAA finds itself in this fascinating geographical and historical bind as regards competition structures.
The Munster Premier League of Limerick, Clare, Cork and Tipp (with Waterford as an almost irrelevant appendage) clearly works for those four counties. It works on a hurling level and it works on a spectator and promotional level. For those four counties. And I suppose for your non-connected television viewer like myself who likes watching these games, and occasionally going to them (I think I would have attended three or four games in this yearâs Munster hurling championship at least had I been in full health).
The Ulster football championship - or more precisely, these days, the Ulster final - works.
You could argue the Galway/Mayo/Roscommon trifecta works to an extent in Connacht but not to the same level.
Nothing else works currently. The Leinster football and hurling championships donât work, the Munster football championship is a joke, the new football format is a joke.
But what do you do to solve the problem?
Do you get rid of those Limerick/Clare/Cork/Tipp round robin games? Iâve seen it suggested to abolish the provincial championships altogether and go with two mixed round robin groups of 5 or 6 teams each. But then youâre abolishing the Munster championship! I donât think thatâs a good idea. Is it?
If you go back to the pre-round robin back door format, Waterford might start challenging again, but youâre getting rid of those Box Office industries Munster Premier League games. Is that a good idea? I donât know.
A received wisdom has emerged in recent years, driven by people including Oisin McConville, that the Ulster Championship and the Ulster final needs to go, even though the Ulster Championship works as competition and the Ulster final is a phenomenal occasion. That it needs to go âfor the good of the gameâ. But we now see the alternative, and the alternative is not very enticing.
The big mistake the GAA and the media and Joe Brolly et al continually make is that they are only interested in addressing the symptoms of problems, not the causes.
Addressing symptoms means saying that 16 football teams are shit and letâs banish them to the Timmy Mallet Vibrant Cup, which has proved anything but vibrant. But then we see that six or seven teams in the big cup are shit as well, and the crowds arenât interested. So what do you do about those symptoms? Go to an 8 or 10 team All-Ireland? Youâre just cementing structural imbalance further, and permanently.
To address the causes of the problems you have to go deep into the causes of structural imbalances and try to solve the problem there - but that will take years - and public discourse around GAA has become like public discourse around everything else - a dishonest performance, with any non sequitur reached for in order to face when an uncomfortable point is made.
The advantage certain counties possess in the GAA â via population, size, good land, industries and so on â was quickly noted and a topic by the 1900s. By the 1910s, there were proposals around, say, a Leitrim, Roscommon and Sligo amalgamation. Any such proposal got fiercely resisted because county identity, even in a losing context, was already so embedded. What can you doâŚ
Team Ulster was just another gimmicky rerun of a concept long familiar, so as to keep DĂłnal Ăg Cusackâs profile boosted. A sock puppet like Kieran Shannon was happy to play along.
To be honest, I have studied the history of hurling pretty closely and the game is arguably in its healthiest ever state, overall terms, even though styles and facets currently predominating can be unattractive in aesthetic terms.
I donât think itâs as simple as that at all though.
Say if you had a Team Ulster, does that mean thereâs no Tyrone team or Cavan team competing at Lory Meagher level or whatever?
Do you have a Team Ulster competing and Tyrone/Cavan/Donegal also competing or Team Ulster minus Tyrone/Cavan/Donegal competing etc.? Thatâs then the end of the lower tier competitions.
You can easily then drive a wedge between players who are good enough to play for Team Ulster and those who arenât. The rest might give up the game if their teams are shorn of the best players or disbanded. Do you amalgamate club hurling in Ulster too? Club hurling titles in Tyrone or Cavan are taken seriously by those involved.
What about Louth, who are not in Ulster? Is there a Team Rest Of Leinster? Who would comprise that? Louth, Longford and Wicklow?
Team Ulster and Team Connacht and Team Rest of Leinster probably wouldnât be very good, and they wouldnât attract any support. They just wouldnât.
But I donât think thereâs any point in that. They still wouldnât be very good, certainly wouldnât attract any support, players would probably have less pride in playing for an amalgamation than their own county, there would be less teams, and less players would get the chance to play inter-county hurling.
Sorry Iâm talking about getting it to work. I wouldnât see much point in joining any adult teams unless they were joined for a significant period underage first.
I often think that too much is fixated at county level when it comes to growing a code, it would take a lot of investment and knowledge and a few generations that doesnât exist to turn a county from dormant into a competitive entity.
Talks of asking football oriented clubs to not pay lip service and give hurling equal footing at nursery level is fanciful and the same is true for hurling dominant areas with football.
I think there is one area the gaa could find growth grow either code in non traditional areas and that would be in secondary schools where you have numbers from numerous clubs and the ability to concentrate quality coaching but it wouldnât be easy but if managed right with the clubs and county board/development squads you could easily grow the playing numbers over a decade - rather than trying to get small population bases already struggling to field trying to squeeze in another code you could start a new club using the schools pitches/facilities with the pick of a number of clubs.
There is no easy solution though or quick path to establish hurling in areas where it doesnât already have a foothold though and even putting those structures in place for 12/13 year olds is probably too late unless they already have exposure to the game
Well, I understand where you are coming from â and you are spot on about the importance of prior juvenile splices. But that amalgamation will never happen â and would be better off, I would argue, in never happening.
On a more general note: people are to be commended for seeking improvement but there is no way round the conundrum that complex topics â and what could be more complex than creating something where nothing or nearly nothing exists? â are not amenable to simple overarching solutions.
An example is a chestnut in Kilkenny about club structures. Every so often, you hear someone saying it would be great for player development if two divisional teams, North Kilkenny and South Kilkenny, featured at Senior level. Sounds lovely and sounds wonderful. Would help fellas from Junior clubs get to intercounty standard. Etc.
The reality? Far different. Kilkenny is widely admired and envied for having a 12 club structure at Senior and at Intermediate. This structure facilitates consistently meaningful league action.
Introducing a North Kilkenny team and a South Kilkenny team would require relegating two clubs from Senior into Intermediate and two clubs from Intermediate into Junior. If we allow an average of 35 players on a hurling panel, this scenario would mean 70 fewer hurlers experiencing Senior and 70 fewer hurlers experiencing Intermediate.
I have never seen faces to fall as much when this penny drops.
I think thereâs a fundamental difference between the tiered competitions in hurling and football.
The gaps between the strong and the weak are simply too big and too embedded in hurling because hurling is a more skilful sport with much higher barriers to higher level competition. But the tiered competitions definitely improve the lot of hurlers in weaker counties in the 17 to 32 bracket.
Though these competitions are not perfect, and properly making the jump from that 10-16 bracket that Offaly/Antrim/Laois/Carlow/Westmeath inhabit up to the top nine is probably harder than ever now, because the top tier has gone round robin and itâs harder to sustain, so you get the yo-yo trend where Westmeath, Carlow, Laois, Antrim etc, will probably yo-yo constantly between the McDonagh up and the Leinster Championship without ever really getting a chance to establish themselves. Offaly will probably manage that gap eventually because of embedded tradition, because Offaly has a hard-wired identity as a proper top tier hurling county, meaning the work is going in at ground level to make that jump back up to the top tier happen.
If youâre a Donegal or a Tyrone or a Louth or a Cavan, the tiered competitions work because youâre getting a regular programme of inter-county games which you didnât get before. Thereâs an outlet there now which simply wasnât there previously. Your lot is improved.
People ask why tiered competitions work at club level. They can work in inter-county hurling for the same reasons they work at club level. Because otherwise there would be nothing else. Because you are very small.
But none of that is the case in football. Football is an athleteâs game, not an artistâs game, though you can still get artists in football. The inherent gaps just arenât the same as in hurling. Pretty much every county has something to hang their hat on in football in terms of tradition, like if youâre Longford, youâve beaten Derry and Mayo in the recent past, if youâre Antrim youâve been in the Ulster final and rattled Kerry in the recent past, if youâre Wicklow, youâve beaten Kildare and Down in the recent past, and your clubs have won Leinster and All-Ireland senior titles, if youâre Wexford youâve been in an All-Ireland semi-final not too long ago.
I think tiered championship competitions in inter-county football simply donât work. They only alienate and increase gaps, not close them. With proper competition formats, ie. the League 1A/1B/2A/2B system, the opportunity is there to close gaps.
People say tiered competitions work at club level, and they do.
But some things are just different at club level and county level, and some things are different between hurling and football. Amalgamations can and do work at club level - but wonât work at county level. The county identity is too hard wired. Tiered competitions in football are another which work at club level, but not inter-county, for similarish reasons.
I made the point re the football championship when it was drawn up that the whole thing should revert each year and every team should have the opportunity to be a Sam Maguire/top tier county at the start of the championship rather than being consigned to the second tier unless they make a provincial final.
The 8 provincial finalists should be tier one and the remainder decided by open draw. So the 16 teams knocked out in the quarter finals/provisional rounds play off in the first round of qualifiers with the 8 winners playing the 8 losing provincial semi finalists for a spot in the top tier - make it open draw.
Monaghan v Mayo in Clones and Roscommon v Tyrone in Dr Hyde with the season on the line with the loser consigned to tier 2 for the rest of the summer would have been far more compelling than anything we have seen this year and would allow a team or two each year to carve their way into the top tier with a soft draw - which would do more for the promotion of football and buzz in the county that being perennial Tailtainn cup contenders
Hurling man doesnât give a flying fuck about hurling in Tyrone or Wicklow or Laois.
Hurling man would prefer if theyâd all give it up altogether and leave the real hurling to 8 or 9 counties.