Yeah, 11 weeks. August bank holiday. Should be a cracker.
I genuinely think the league being the league but linked closely in some way to a straight knock out tiered championship is the way to go. The die hards will still go to the league and the fair weather fans will go to knock out championship games if the format is nice and simple. Provincials need to become pre season competitions. This is football. I think the hurling format is as good as well get just need more competitive teams.
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Which GAA President is that?
Trump maybe 
Ffs they be scratching their balls for months and a match then the BH weekendā¦ Should be good alright
John Horan
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Agreed. The do-or-die Munster Championship badly needs a competitive Cork & Tipp again.
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Good to see the Off The Ball crew now admitting the provincial championships are the best format after they clamoured for their abolition last October.
Heard Joe Molloy slating it about an hour ago.
But sure if the Ulster final is a sell out and the Munster hurling is a sell out it proves the public wants these occasions and they should remain.
Hard to argue against facts.
And if Wexford hadnt to have been stupid cunts and beaten Westmeath and got to the final against Galway, there would have been a big crowd at that too.
We wonāt really know the impact of the split season for a few seasons and Iām slow to judge anything on crowds after covid. People were at home for long stretches of the past two years and are mad to attend events.
Itāll be interesting in august when thereās no real big inter county games to look forward or for the media to cover. Iād say people wonāt be too happy with situation.
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Starting to dawn on Club Players in the last week or so too that summers of Stags, Weddings, Concerts, Festivals, Galway Races and Travelling are about to become a thing of the past.
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Neither are crowds the only basis to judge. Thereās a core audience there and people will always be drawn to events, ie. Mayo v Galway, an Ulster final or a Munster hurling final, no matter when theyāre played.
But the amount of general media coverage and the attention paid to it by the general public matters too.
I find myself reading/listening to/watching less general GAA coverage during this championship so far than during previous ones. Iām watching (most of) the matches and thatās about it.
I think the crowds at the Ulster championship overall this year are a poor harbinger for the success of the experiment. Crowds in general bar the possible exception of Munster hurling definitely seem down. I would be interested if people could come up with full, directly comparable figures v 2018 and 2019.
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Most club championships apart from all ireland semi finalists started in August anyway so no change for the vast majority.
Theres a big difference between starting on August 10 compared to July 10.
As in you mean club championships are starting July 10th this year?
Yes. And earlier in some places. Notth Tipp starting on June 26th
I make it that the total attendance in the Munster hurling round robin this year (circa 222k) is about 14k more than 2018 (circa 208k) but 20k less than 2019 (circa 242k).
I would be surprised if the total attendances in any of the other championships matched those of 2018 or 2019.
Monaghan v Down clocked a particularly paltry attendance of 5,418.
Notwithstanding the addition of Westmeath and Laois and the departure of Offaly from the Leinster hurling championship since 2018, Leinster hurling attendances seem down too.
Galway v Kilkenny, Kilkenny v Wexford and Wexford v Galway all clocked attendances around 4k lower than the corresponding 2018 fixtures and while I donāt have the official attendance figure for Wexford v Dublin this year to hand the attendance looked very sparse so Iād assume that was down on 2018 too.