FOUR MORE WEEKS
The most straightforward solution available to GAA is to simply allow Championships some breathing room
The current media rights deal may need to be revisited before 2027
There has been very little written about any of the football games
JARLATH BURNS has been on the road a lot in recent weeks. Being on the road, of course, comes with the office. Pitch openings and medal presentations are part of the gig, but he has also travelled around the island looking for solutions.
Along with some of the Central Competitions Control Committee, the GAA’s president has been presenting possible changes to the senior football championship to various stakeholders. The idea is to make the inter-county calendar a little less compressed, give the sport’s headline tournaments a bit more of a chance to breathe.
One of the six options being discussed is Connacht GAA chief John Prenty’s sensible suggestion that provincial champions are rewarded with automatic progression to the All-Ireland quarterfinal. Such a scenario would reduce the round-robin to four groups of three teams. Another topic is a winners and losers round following the round of 16.
Nobody can accuse Burns of sitting on his hands since taking office. Between the ‘sandbox’ where Jim Gavin and his Football Review Committee are assessing the way forward for the game, to another revamp of the championship, there has been a real dynamism to the early days of his presidency – at least with regard to Gaelic football. Hurling folk may beg to differ.
A consensus from the thousands who have filled in the FRC survey is most people don’t think Gaelic football is in too bad a state. Just needs a few tweaks here and there. The big issue arises when there are mis-matches. When two teams of equal standard meet, it usually leads to a very watchable spectacle – think Dublin-Mayo and the final 15 minutes of GalwayArmagh last Sunday or Roscommon’s goalfest with neighbours Cavan the evening before.
And yet, with knockout football finally here, there are more issues. Just after Mayo and Dublin reminded the general public of how entertaining the game can be at its best, we arrive at a situation this weekend where all four preliminary quarter-finals are behind a paywall.
We are not one for banging a drum against GAAGO – even if the monopoly that RTÉ now hold over the championship and the ethical issues over the public broadcaster and the GAA in a commercial partnership together make us uncomfortable – but surely, there was scope to show two of the preliminary quarter-finals on terrestrial television, especially after everyone was so entertained by the ding-dong in the Hyde last Sunday?
Visibility matters. It is the most salient way of promoting the games, particularly now as the paranoia of inter-county managers means there is little in the way of player interviews. The current media rights deal runs until 2027, but it may need to be re-visited before then.
Burns has proven himself to be a leader who is not afraid of change when and if it is needed. And there is little or no doubt that some flexibility needs to be worked into the rights deal so that we aren’t left with a situation where a wider public whose interest in football was reawakened by Mayo’s effort in Roscommon find themselves distracted by other things, most notably a certain tournament going on in Germany.
RTÉ’s rights to the Euros mean they must show every game. And that’s fair enough. But it has created its own problems.
The fact that Dublin hurlers’ AllIreland quarter-final with Cork threw in at the rather ludicrous time of 1.15pm yesterday meant that swathes of under-age players in the capital who wanted to go to the game, couldn’t – I know because there is one in our house. What a missed opportunity, another example of Croke Park shooting themselves in the foot.
Of course, Croke Park will point to their efforts in trying to switch the hurling matches this afternoon – and playing the Tailteann Cup double-bill yesterday. In actual fact, it was a hurling county who had the decisive vote, although there might have been gamesmanship on Clare’s part.
But all of these issues come back to the same thing. The inter-county calendar is too condensed. Too many games are compressed into too short a space of time. And that remains the single biggest problem with both championships.
Take the Euros for an example. It’s a shorter timeframe for that tournament but the games are spaced out in such a way that the narratives and storylines are allowed to develop. So, we learn about Albania’s rise while also absorbing the latest information about Kylian Mbappe’s broken nose.
The way that the championship is currently structured, there is simply no time for any storylines to develop in any sort of meaningful way. Mayo and Derry should be the defining narrative of the week. But instead, everyone gets side-tracked by the brunchtime throw-in for Dublin vs Cork.
Flick – or scroll – through your newspapers the past few days and there has been very little written about any of the football games. Nothing about how Monaghan are the great survivors or Tyrone starting to find their groove or the improvements Louth have made under Ger Brennan.
That is on the teams themselves and their reticence to do any media. Nobody wants to hear a journalist complaining, but it is another issue that Burns – who has always been accommodating and media-friendly as both player and administrator – has to get to grips with. The feeling here is that he will, as it is another area where Gaelic Games are losing the battle for hearts and minds.
But for all the talk of football formats and marginalised hurling quarter-finals, the most simple solution for the GAA is staring them in the face – lengthen the inter-county season. By a month. All that is needed is four more weeks.
That will allow both championships a bit more time to breathe. It will stop, a small bit, football and hurling crawling over each other for attention. And crucially, it will allow story-lines to develop in such a way that it draws in the public.
Four more weeks. That’s the one solution which can make everything else work.