Be careful, GAA, what you wish for

Sunday morning, I made it my business to trawl the national newspapers, online and in print, for some coverage of the Cavan v Tyrone game – but it was nowhere to be found.

The new normal, this condensed season, means that the national media just can’t cover the games the way they once did. Saturday’s papers were the same; the Irish News (which focuses heavily on Ulster football and does a great job) aside, a couple of paragraphs was all the match got.

In fact, in an interesting and, as always given the author, well-crafted piece with Peter Canavan in the Sunday Independent, the small matter of a Cavan v Tyrone Ulster Championship match actually amazingly did not get a mention.

That’s the price of progress, I suppose; what were once huge occasions, sporting events of national importance, have been downgraded.

Those who, as is the fashion, wish to see the provincial championships scrapped or relegated to the dog days of January, the staging post for the officially designated ‘pre-season’ competitions, need to take a step back and think of what we would be losing if we went down that road. The last time there was change on that scale, it set the association on a path to where we are now – small crowds at games, club leagues destroyed and counties stretched to the limit financially by having to prepare teams for needless matches.

It’s worth noting that, unthinkably given the current state of play, eight different counties brought home the Sam Maguire in the 1990s and what did the GAA decide at the end of it? To radically alter the “one and done” system.

It took a few years but the gap between top and bottom got wider thereafter and the runaway train that is the inter-county game was set in motion, too.

More games, more training, more experts needed to run that training, more money. We’re now at a point where 10s of millions of euro are being spent preparing inter-county football and hurling teams – and that’s every year!

It’s worth recalling that there were some sane voices at the time. The veteran Kildare official and former All-Ireland final referee Seamus Aldridge spoke out against the wanton scrapping of a system that had served the association well for so long but he was one of the few who weren’t swept away in the catch cry that inter-county players were doing all this training for just one game (which ignored all of the other games they played, but anyway…).

“If,” Aldridge warned, “you ask children whether they want two plates of jelly or one, they'll always opt for two.”

And then came the sugar rush, the empty calories of matches on top of matches, to the point where the season is now bloated beyond recognition.

Back when the provincials were all-important, teams had something realistic to aim for. The example of the least populated county, Leitrim, is always introduced when there is a discussion on football structures (unfairly – hard cases make bad law and all that) but Leitrim had won a never-to-be-forgotten Connacht title just six years before that decision was made and were highly competitive in the subsequent years.

Ten counties, in fact, had experienced the joy and replenishment of reaching an All-Ireland senior football final in the previous decade while - along with Leitrim - Clare and Cavan had ended long provincial famines.

What, tell me, was wrong with that?

In hurling, there was never a period like the 1990s in the history of the sport.

“Hurling was a divided society where the rich got richer and the poor were patronised with pennies of encouragement and pats on the head,” wrote leading journalist Denis Walsh.

“The status quo was occasionally challenged but never overthrown.”

Between 1990 and 1996, in seven seasons, the Liam MacCarthy Cup was won by six different counties, namely Cork, Tipperary, Kilkenny, Offaly, Clare and Wexford. Limerick also won a first Munster title in 13 years and Down won their first Ulster title since 1941.

And what happened then? For the 1997 season, a back door was introduced. More games - what could be wrong with that?

Now, it could be superficially argued that it didn’t affect hurling negatively as the game is still in rude health at the top level but, below that, it is in awful shape now. The five-tiered system gives teams a title to aim for but it also reinforces the sense that the top sides have pulled the ladder up behind them.

The great failing of the tiered system is that no new county has emerged to join the leading ones since it was introduced and, in fact, they have lost one power in that great dual county Offaly, who are no longer a force at the top level and, despite their best efforts, look unlikely to be any time soon.

We know that one of the pillars of the GAA is local rivalries, at club and county level. That quest to get one over on the crowd up the road inspires passion and that in turn breeds commitment.

By downgrading the provincial championships, not giving them room to breathe in the calendar, asking teams to play week on week, removing replays, all to fit in a bloated system whereby there will be 24 Sam Maguire games played to lose four teams, the GAA are toying with a valued part of the heritage of the games.

It's no wonder only 18,000 fans have turned out for Cavan’s two matches to date in Ulster; the occasions have been diluted. Twenty years ago, a crowd of 22,000 turned up in Breffni Park to see Cavan play Down. What was once a celebratory pint is now an apologetic shandy.

In the rush to be modern and progressive, we are abandoning what made our games great in the first place and, with the groupthink around the provincial championships growing louder, it’s only going to get worse.

Be careful, GAA, what you wish for.