Ultimately it’s a hobby. Nobody needs to do it. They all do it as they enjoy it. The training thing and commitment isn’t much more than any young lad in his twenties who’s into health and fitness for aesthetics.
You’ve a freakishly strong Limerick team. That won’t last. If a sport with a small number of teams like hurling has one very strong team like it has at moment it can destabilise it as you get one sided games.
I’ve been going to Croke Park since the late 70s. On every walk out of there with my dad he’d say “football is finished”, “it’s gone”. We’d be back in the next day.
Absolutely. Waterford should field a reserve team first day against Limerick, but they most probably will field a full strength team. This is the only way for Waterford with the smallest pick to navigate this abomination of a round robin system.
The crunch game for Waterford is Cork in Week 2. The winner of that will be well placed to advance, the losers probably eliminated. The cards are heavily skewed in favour of Cork there. They’re at home, Cork have a rest week, first round when Waterford will be killing themselves against Limerick and most likely picking up a raft of injuries. Cork also have the bonanza of Limerick in Round 5.
Limerick have won 8 drawn 1 lost 0 of their 9 Round Robin games over their first 3 rounds. Advancement secured for Limerick after 3 rounds 3 out of 3 times. Limerick have then fielded severely weakened teams in Round 4 and they’ve Won 0 out of 3 of their 4th and final Round Robin games. Limerick perfectly correct to do that but it exposes the utter nonsense of the format when 3 sides have to face the full might of Limerick but 1 side will face what is essentially a reserve half arsed Limerick team and most likely bag a devalued win that nobody else gets the bonus of. As you’ve said, what sort of a gibberish, bullshit format allows for a farce like that.
GAA love change and tinkering with structures just for the sake of it. You probably had the best structure to the Hurling Championship from 2002-2017 with every serious County pretty much guaranteed 3 Championship matches. They couldn’t leave it alone though. They rip it up for this abomination of a Round Robin system with its endless dead rubbers and pointless matches and a system which ultimately stacks the cards even further towards the stronger counties.
As someone alluded to earlier on this forum, the problem with Kildare was they picked all the All stars who are drowning in management slowly over the Burke lad.