The recent defeats in hurling of Waterford, Limerick and Kerry and of Laois in both hurling and football, have sharpened the continuing debate about ‘early exits’ from the championships and have spawned a ‘rake’of proposals for new championship formats, observes An Fear Rua …

If AFR remembers correctly, this issue first arose last year following the elimination of Carlow from the Leinster senior football championship. It got legs under it when the Football Development Committee (FDC), rather like a horse or a greyhound breeder, crossed a league with a knockout competition and produced their discredited proposals. These were so complex that it would have taken one of those ‘Scholars and Fellows of Trinity, far renowned for their Greek and Latinity’ to work out which teams would actually go forward to the concluding stages, with matches taking place between the fifth worst team in Leinster and the Munster runners-up for a place in the All Ireland final! Or maybe, it was the other way around?

The ostensible aim of these various proposals is give players more championship games before their county is eliminated. The ‘meeja’ bearers of these proposals usually accompany them with players’ quotes along the lines of: ‘We trained for XXX nights since last December and now we’re eliminated after only one game….’ . Sometimes this has the added flourish of a comment like: ‘And we won’t appear in the championship again for another nine months’. A further journalistic embellishment is the unctuous lament for ‘County X… it is unfair to them and their gallant and colourful supporters…’. Sometimes, An Fear Rua finds it hard to keep a dry eye of a Monda’ mornin’ as he pores over the match reports and this kind of analysis.

It prompts AFR to venture that there are some people who won’t be satisfied until entirely new ways of deciding the championships are introduced. For example, we could have a system whereby the unfortunate ‘County X’ – mentioned above – would continue to play the opposition for as many games as it took until they finally beat them. The only problem with that idea, however, is that the first round of the Munster hurling championship of the year 2000 might still not be finished up to some time around the year 2012. But, at least, ‘County X’ – the ‘meeja’s’ darlin’ would have won through at last.

To accommodate those teams who complain of training for hundreds of nights before departing ignominiously in their first game, some of the bright sparks in Gowlnacalley-John Redmonds came up with the idea the other night of dispensing with matches completely! In other words, to get through to the next round a team would simply have to train more nights (or even days) than their opponents. Can you imagine AFR’s old pal Seán Óg Ó Ceallacháin reading out the Gaelic Sports Results on RTÉ steam radio of a Sunda’ night: ‘ Carlow 123 nights training, Laois 112 nights; Waterford 133 nights and 25 days training, Cork 102 nights; Roscommon 110 nights, Mayo 110 nights – a draw …’ and so on. This would surely suit the players and modern managers who believe that training is more important than playing and winning. Of course, there would have to be an agreed system for referees, linesmen and umpires to travel to the various counties to verify the number of nights training. As with goals and points, maybe a day’s training would equal three nights?

Well, ask yourself, are either of the above schemes any more daft than some of the harebrained ‘reforms’ that have been put forward?

AFR’s approach to this whole issue is governed one major principle. It is that the game of hurling is so enjoyable to watch and to play and is so distinctive that it is worth taking special measures to ensure it spreads and strengthens in every county in Ireland. Let’s be honest – there is a small minority of fans who vociferously couldn’t care less about hurling. These people are more to be pitied than anything else. Much more worryingly, however, is the fairly large number of GAA ‘ofeeshals’ and ‘committeeee’ members who pay lip service to the promotion of hurling but who do everything they can to strangle its growth because of perceived threats to their little fiefdoms.

If you accept the AFR’s Governing Principle, then it follows ineluctably, (as some of AFR’s legal eagle friends, God help them, might say) that you must do something about it. There appears to be a developing consensus – certainly among ‘meeja’ commentators – that the existing ‘sudden death’ aspect of the championships is unfair and needs to be ended. An Fear Rua would counter this by suggesting that a league and a ‘knock out’ are two distinct types of competition, requiring radically different skills and approaches from managers and teams. A league is a test of consistency and concentration over the long haul, in all kinds of weather at all kinds of venues, with teams safe in the knowledge that if they stumble once or even twice they still have the chance of a ‘second bite at the cherry’. A ‘sudden death’ championship calls for a degree of preparation and focus for a single day, with the sure knowledge that ‘one stumble and you’re gone until next year’. Different teams will always perform differently in both types of competition. Only truly great teams succeed in both simultaneously.

An example from one of the foreign sports, which will be familiar to some of AFR’s Decies readers will help underline this point. From the mid-Sixties onwards, Waterford FC won six League of Ireland soccer championships in succession, requiring them to win or draw something like twelve to fourteen games each season. During all that time, exactly the same panel of players failed miserably to win an FAI Cup. Shamrock Rovers, on the other hand, could not top the League, but easily won the Cup five or six times in succession, usually after a maximum of only three games. This didn’t prove that one team was better than the other – just that they were both good, but different.

Maybe one of the real problems facing the GAA has been the constant denigration by some players, managers and ‘meeja’ writers of the League competitions. Unfortunately, some GAA traditionalists have given weight to this process by harping on about the ‘sanctity’ of the provincial championships and things like ‘the unique atmosphere of Thurles on a Munster final day’. If more GAA people accepted that the winning of a league was a valid and equivalent – but different – exercise to winning a championship, we might be making some progress.

AFR would be very reluctant to end the existing provincial championship structure. Indeed, he would counsel his many hurling friends in Limerick and Waterford to think long and hard before agreeing to end the present set-up in Munster. The danger is that any new format would be regarded as ‘devalued currency’ and a county like the Decies would always face the jibe that they had failed to win a ‘proper’ Munster championship in the old style since 1963 and their chances of doing so again would be gone forever.

A major hurdle facing all of us is the stark historical fact the number of counties varies widely per province. Indeed, if you wanted to design the numbers to create the maximum unfairness and difficulty, it would probably look very like our existing four provinces with five, six, nine and twelve counties each. The other boundary condition is that within those provinces, not all counties are of an even or similar standard. Munster’s six counties con