Mostly football inclusion not exclusion is needed in senior football

The way to improve any sport is to expose the practitioners to a higher standard, not a lower one, writes Michael Hannon.

Colm O’Rourke and Pat Spillane went at it on live TV from polar opposite positions prior to the start of the Dublin and Longford senior championship game last Sunday. Keeping with the theme of his column in last week’s Sunday Independent, O’Rourke started off by branding the Leinster championship a farce.

What were Longford even doing last Sunday playing championship football against Dublin in Croke Park, Glennon Park or any park for that matter, he asked. It was David and Goliath, only on this occasion Goliath wasn’t showing a shred of complacency.

Spillane was adamant that O’Rourke’s solution, to create a separate championship competition, was the wrong one. I actually agree with him.

Dumping all the weak teams in a separate competition like O’Rourke mooted, to fight it out for the latest version of the Tommy Murphy Cup, is not the answer. 

If that was the case there would be 11 Leinster teams playing for a separate cup, such is Dublin’s superiority at the moment. Let’s not forget, nobody was too interested in playing in the Tommy Murphy competition first time round. I was forced to do it one year.

There were more people at our first round McKenna Cup game that year than saw us exit the Tommy Murphy Cup to Antrim on a Saturday morning in Casement Park. That’s more people by a multiple of about 100. The reason being, supporters, just like the players, still have hope in January that this might be their year.

Not Dessie Dolan, though. The people of Westmeath have no hope apparently. He offered his tuppance worth on Sunday evening on the matter and he was firmly behind O’Rourkes position.

Dolan had been on the end of a 17-point hammering from Dublin a few years back and it was this experience that was influencing his point of view.

But Martin McHugh, his co-analyst that evening, was in Spillane’s corner. He purported that these things are cyclical and offered up the gem of information that when he made his debut for Donegal, the full-back wore spectacles. Two years later they won Ulster.

I have some level of sympathy for Dolan, Westmeath, Longford and, to be honest, the rest of Leinster. Dublin are streets ahead of everyone else at the moment in that province and it would be very easy to throw in the towel.

O’Rourke said that Longford need a competition where they play against teams of their own standard, have a realistic chance of winning, and a good opportunity to play in Croke Park. I think they call that Division 4? And I’m pretty sure Longford managed to reach that final this year which was also played in Croke Park.

Spillane choked and spluttered as O’Rourke continued his tirade against the Leinster Championship until he eventually said something that I couldn’t agree more with: you don’t get better by playing teams of a similar standard. You only get better by playing teams that are operating at a higher level.

He was paraphrasing the great chess maxim that was first published in 1883 in a book called Fundamentals of Chess, namely that the only way to get smarter is by playing a smarter opponent.

It reminded me of a conversation I had with our own Paul Brady, the world handball champion, just under a decade ago. You see, Paul wasn’t always the greatest handball player of all time.

In fact, when he was around the age of 21 or 22, he was like most of the other top Irish players of that era, good on this side of the Atlantic, but when they travelled across to the states to play against the Americans, unable to win tournaments or make much impression in them. The Yanks simply were playing the game at a higher level. 

So Paul, at his own expense, would travel to America to play more and more tournaments and over a period of time, eventually adapted to their level, and then surpassed it. He told me that simply playing better opponents it made him a better player.

After a number of years of beating the top Americans regularly, the professional tour folded and Brady was now faced with the situation where all, bar one or two of the tournaments over there, paid out no prize money at all.

It didn’t make much sense to travel thousands of miles around the world at great expense any more. So he reduced the amount of times he played in America. Thus, the number of opportunities the Americans had to play him each year was also greatly reduced.

After he beat Luis Moreno for his fourth world handball title in Dublin a few years back, Moreno spoke of what a great competitor Brady was and lamented how he wished he had more opportunities to play him.

The simple answer at that time would have been, jump on a plane, Luis, fly to ireland and do what Brady and the rest of the Irish had done a decade earlier. Fund yourself in order to play these guys.

Which brings us back to O’Rourke, Spillane, McHugh, Dolan and every other GAA armchair fan. As far as I can see, the problem isn’t that Longford have to play Dublin in the championship, it’s that they only play them once every ten years.

Now I’m not saying that Longford are ever going to beat the Dubs, but they certainly could get to a level where they aren’t getting hammered. Let’s take the totally unrealistic and hypothetical situation whereby Longford play Dublin in the championship every Sunday for ten weeks in a row.

Okay, they’ll lose all ten encounters, but it would be impossible not to see some level of substantial improvement. Like Brady had noted to me all those years ago, there’s nothing wrong with losing as long as you’re learning.

Now? Well, now he simply doesn’t lose. Lesson learned. Regular readers of this column will be aware that I do tend to write a bit about basketball from time to time, and the following is just another example from the NCAA collegiate basketball scene that could inform us a bit better.

There are 347 Division 1 basketball colleges in the states and each is contractually obliged to play two games a year against Division 2 sides. These games tend to take place at the home venue of the Division 2 team.

They’re big money spinners for the smaller sides and as far as experiences go, they help improve not just the players but the coaches, too.

It’s worth realising that if you were starting with a blank page, its doubtful you’d draw up a provinical championship like the one we have inherited. But guess what, it’s the only thing 25 of the 32 counties strive to win each year.
Over 25 years ago, there were no Division 2, 3, or 4 titles.

There was only promotion and demotion and a Division 1 league title. The top four teams in Division 1 qualified for the quarter-finals along with the top two teams in Division 2, and the top team in Division 3 and 4.

Was it a perfect system? No. Far from it. But had it been in place this year, then Longford would have played Cork in the National League quarter-final courtesy of topping division 4. That game would have prepared them better for last Sunday than winning the Division 4 title had they done it this year.

Consider the internal 15-on-15 matches Dublin play at training and compare it to Longford’s 15-on-15 training games. There is no comparison in terms of preparation.

I know I haven’t offered any practical solutions to the problems facing the provincal championships but to me, the aspiration should be to raise stadards everywhere rather than take away the opportunity to play at the highest level.