Not true mate. Loser of Cork and Clare can still go through on 4.
There is absolutely no need to give 9 months of the calendar to inter county teams.
It could very much turn into the worst summer of gaa ever.
What rubbish.
Why do you hate the clubs so much?
At 4 club matches between Sunday and Thursday mate.
Iâd say you were.
Weâll have a season injury or two next weekend Iâm sure youâll be delighted the county players wonât see any club action this year.
You were lucky, every club pitch in Down was closed last Saturday and Sunday so no club action at all. Lads here want more club championship games in them conditions in April, and less club games on ideal pitches in August and September.
Is cork v Clare and Kilkenny v Galway really on at the same time next weekend ?
2pm next Sunday
RTE - Galway v Kilkenny
BBC - Donegal v Tyrone
GoGo - Cork v Clare
Galway v Kilkenny is a glorified challenge, theyâll just coast along until the Leinster final
5 Likes
Of all the Leinster Championship games its probably the least important.
For fucks sake.
If you asked the FAI or the IRFU to booby trap the GAA they wouldnât even come up with that FFS 
4 Likes
Itâs beyond bizarre.
Tickets for Dublin v Meath, cork v Kerry and mayo v Roscommon have reduced by 50 percent.
Galway v Kilkenny probably back by 30 percent.
And fellas think itâs great.
This is Galway your talking about pal, we just donât do coasting.
Despite the absolute kicking theyâre taking from being pushed into April, the provincial championships are still delivering the goods.
Wins for Wicklow and Waterford, Sligo and Cavan giving their best shots, 17k was a decent crowd for Kerry v Cork given the timing and the lack of relevance to the All-Ireland race. Donegal saving Gaelic football yesterday evening. Galway v Mayo should bring a crowd. Donegal v Tyrone and the Ulster final will bring crowds.
Waterford finally doing something against somebody other than Tipp in the hurling round robin. Wexford and Dublin delivering their customary constipated draw in the forever also-rans derby.
The good things that have happened so far in these championships have happened in spite of the format and in spite of the time window.
But the football round robins will be some dirge and the crowds will stay away and in the hurling championship Limerick beating Kilkenny in the final for the third year in a row already looks a fait accompli.
There wonât be a better championship Sunday this year than today, unfortunately.
2 Likes
Yeah because it interferes with there social life.
The Leinster final is set in stone with Dublin or Wexico lined up as cannon fodder for the Munster final losers.
Tough defeat for ye today
Pat Spillane: When Coca-Cola messed with their magic formula, they realised their error â but not tone-deaf GAA
Empty spaces at championship matches are a direct result of Croke Park chiefs burying their heads in the sand over the disastrous split season
In 1985, after 99 years in business, Coca-Cola, the worldâs most iconic drinks brand, decided to change its secret formula for making the beverage.
There was a massive kickback and the company shipped huge criticism. So much so that after 79 days, they reverted to the original formula.
Subsequently, the company went from strength to strength and is now the worldâs leading soft drink manufacturer.
Sound familiar? Of course, it does.
In their wisdom, the GAA decided to change the formula of the jewel in their crown: the inter-county championships.
They squeezed their inter-county programme into six months despite playing more games and gave up the months of August and September when sports like soccer and rugby were at the start of their seasons.
And there has been kickback. The obvious one is attendances have dropped, whereas the trend is the other way around in other sports. The Irish womenâs rugby and soccer teams had record crowds recently.
There were 50,000 in the Aviva Stadium for Leinsterâs Champions Cup quarter-final win over La Rochelle, while full-house signs are the order of the day regularly in the League of Ireland.
Sixty thousand empty seats at the Dublin v Meath clash at Croke Park was an embarrassment.
Surely, like the Coca-Cola top brass, the GAA ought to act.
Sadly, GAA officials are not like those executives. They are tone-deaf, oblivious to the criticism from fans and ex-players. They seem hell-bent on retaining this new formula, which is sucking whatever life is left out of the championship.
Jarlath Burns has shown himself to be a proactive president. He sees problems and looks to address them. The Football Review Committee is a case in point.
It is time for him to be proactive on the split season. I welcome his remarks on GAAGOâs new Ratified discussion forum when he talked about the possibility of staging the All-Ireland finals in September again.
A few home truths have to be addressed and a few egos need to be burst. An admission must be made that they have got it wrong. They have cannibalised the championship and are destroying it.
I guess you are bored by this stage with my endless rants about the split season. So, for the rest of the column, I will focus on the first two weekends of action from the provincial football championships.
The Leinster Championship is a shambles. This is old hat â it has been an ongoing story for years. Maybe there is a case for throwing Dublin out of Leinster, though I cannot imagine any other province wanting them.
Rather than looking for a gimmicky solution, perhaps we should reflect on why Dublinâs dominance in senior football isnât repeated in hurling, nor indeed at either under-17 or under-20 level in football.
Dublin arenât the problem. It is the 10 other counties that are unable to get their act together and be competitive.
In defence of the Leinster Championship, it has provided a surprise result: Wicklowâs defeat of Westmeath, as well as the best match to date: Kildare v Wicklow.
It was a cracker, while the Louth v Wexford tie featured some of the best passages of kicking I have seen in championship football for a long time.
Last weekend, I warned about the dangers of trying to create a level playing field in sport. In theory, it is a good idea, but it doesnât really work. Inevitably, there are still going to be hammerings.
Hereâs an example from the tiered-hurling championship in which teams of supposedly similar ability are grouped together.
In the Christy Ring Cup, Kildare and London each had 11-point wins over Sligo and Tyrone, respectively. In the Lory Meagher, Longford hammered Lancashire by 18 points and in the Nicky Rackard, Mayo trashed Monaghan by 22 points. Level playing field my arse!
I know this is sacrilege, but maybe the Ulster championship is not all it is cracked up to be.
Monaghan v Cavan for two-thirds of the game was a bore fest.
Cavan didnât score their first point from play until the 40th minute. And although they had the advantage of the wind in the first half, Monaghan spent a lot of time playing the ball back to goalkeeper Rory Beggan, who got Man of The Match on the BBC. The mind boggles.
Fermanagh and Armagh was just as one-sided as Dublin v Meath, although there were fewer column inches wasted on it. It was men against boys stuff.
After 55 minutes, Fermanagh had scored 0-3. Serious analysis of Armagh is out of the question because the opposition was so poor.
Down v Antrim was awful. It was modern football at its worst: recycle, reset, pass over, pass back. When co-commentator Philly McMahon starting talking about âoffensive transitionâ, I gave up. I realised I had lost 60-plus minutes of my life which I would never get back.
While it is pointless to analyse Dublinâs performance, it did occur to me that maybe Brian Fenton is the conductor who keeps it all ticking over. In his absence, they spluttered. Iâm sure this did not go unnoticed in either Kerry or Derry.
The Connacht Championship games in London and New York ought to be cherished. Essentially, they are rewarding the work which GAA communities in those cities do to keep the GAA alive.
As somebody who personally attended championship games in Gaelic Park and Ruislip, I believe they should be on the bucket list of every GAA aficionado.
Great crowds, great craic and great atmosphere. It is like having Electric Picnic, the Ploughing Championships and the Fleadh Cheol at the same venue at the same time.
And finally, to my pet subject: referees.
There was a song and dance a couple of months ago about high-profile football referees failing the bleep test. Of course, being fit is an important prerequisite for referees.
But so too is consistency, which seemed absent in some of the refereeing performances last weekend.
Coincidentally, there was a similar incident in two matches â but with very different outcomes. Kildareâs Kevin Flynn was rightly red-carded for a head-high challenge by referee SeĂĄn Lonergan. However, Armaghâs Jarly Ăg Burns was shown a yellow card by referee Joe McQuillan for the same kind of foul on Fermanaghâs Declan McCusker.
With 20 minutes left in the Wicklow v Kildare match, Eoin Doyle hand-tripped a Wicklow opponent. It was a clear black card offence, but the referee showed him a yellow instead.
Meanwhile, in Croke Park, referee Thomas Murphy penalised Meathâs Cian McBride for the technical offence of not putting up his hand to signal a mark but didnât penalise the 12 steps SeĂĄn Bugler took before scoring Dublinâs first goal.
I rest my case.