English agrees with new hurling format

A prominent member of the Hurling Development Committee (HDC) has welcomed the decision to scrap the second phase of the National Hurling League.

Tipperary's Nicholas English was responding to Tuesday's release of the fixtures for next year's National Leagues, which announced a return to the old system of quarter-finals and semi-finals.

For the past three years the National Hurling League has been organised on the basis of taking the top three teams in each of the two Division One groups and having them play their counterparts in the other group. The top two counties after that programme of matches played each other in the league final.

"I was fairly opposed to the second phase anyway because it was leading to too many games," said English, "particularly in the light of the new championship structures. Counties are guaranteed five games in the summer and I felt that the second phase was additional games just to fill out the calendar.

"Also the format was leading to a lot of meaningless games and arguments over whether it was better to carry over points from the first phase or not. In 2003 for instance, Kilkenny and Tipperary were more or less qualified. Then the following year Offaly got relegated because they couldn't carry over their points."

English was a member of the HDC that devised the new championship system, which restricts the number of counties that can enter the MacCarthy Cup to 12 and provides a qualifying round of two groups for those teams that have lost matches in the provincial championships.

He admits that the first season of this format was disappointing. The problem was that each of the two qualifier groups turned out to be entirely predictable apart from who would win the group.

Only one team suffered badly for losing a group match and that was Waterford whose defeat by Clare threw them in against All-Ireland champions Cork rather than Wexford, who proved easy targets for Clare.

"I was disappointed that the major change we engineered through didn't work better. We needed a 'group of death' or for the standard of hurling to be even across 10 counties. At the moment there are only eight.

"The consolation was that we got the top eight teams into the All-Ireland quarter-finals. I'm not sure the four games were of brilliant standard but they were competitive with the exception of Clare-Wexford.

"I think we should look at the progress made over, say, a decade. Ten years ago we had one double bill of All-Ireland semi-finals, including one match that was frequently one-sided and then a final. This year we had the qualifier matches, even with poor attendances, followed by two double bills of quarter-finals, two stand-alone semi-finals and a final. That's a big improvement although I'm not sure it's the finished article yet."