Modest reform misses big issue

Hurling Within four months the medium-term future of the hurling championship will be decided. Perhaps it's not too surprising given the rapid development in intercounty structures over the past seven years but not an awful lot's going to change.

At a fairly early stage the Hurling Development Committee decided that discretion was the better part of valour. A couple of months after being appointed the committee were leaking like a sieve, gently sprinkling the word that the changes to intercounty structures under consideration would not be radical.

The HDC had been entrusted by the Competitions Review Task Force with devising proposals for hurling that would be incorporated into the task force's report, released last October and formally launched earlier this month.

What was disappointing about the swift curtailing of the committee's ambitions was the presence of heavy hitters from the world of hurling: Cyril Farrell, Liam Griffin and Ger Loughnane are former intercounty managers turned commentators with seven All-Ireland titles between them.

It seems that the HDC believed it impossible to bring next April's congress with them on anything more adventurous than the current proposals scheduled to take effect from the 2005 championship.

This pragmatism means the plan should be accepted but it would have been better if the HDC had aimed higher.

The Football Development Committee whose revolutionary proposals were shot down in flames at the 2000 Congress weren't successful but the work they had done evangelising on the need to break the stranglehold of the knockout format bore fruit very quickly.

When the qualifier series was born six months later, Paraic Duffy, who chaired that Work Group as well as the current Task Force, paid tribute to the role of the FDC blueprint. "I think what happened today could not have happened without the FDC in advance," he said on the day a special congress accepted his group's proposals.

"The FDC was perhaps a little bit too radical and we proposed something else. Maybe in two years' time people will look at it again. But the FDC debate and the work they did was absolutely crucial and I think it's important that that is recognised."

Putting reform of the provincial system on the agenda - as HDC member Nicky English has in the past - would have done the wider debate no harm. Given the instinctive conservatism of congress it's as well to condition delegates rather than handing them what they deem palatable at the first time of asking.

Beyond that lost opportunity, there's nothing wrong with these ideas and by providing more fixtures through a round-robin qualifier round and the most-welcome introduction of a full quarter-final series - as opposed to the two-match round under the existing system - the plan improves the championship.

But at the heart of the current format's difficulties is the scarcity of competitive counties and their unequal distribution across the provinces. Yet these were issues on which the HDC could make no impact.

To break up the provincial system and provide an even spread of competition across the provinces would entail either scrapping or undermining the Munster championship. This would certainly be a radical departure given that it's the one province that is truly competitive.

Furthermore the Munster championship's semi-finals and finals attract nearly twice the crowds that attend the Leinster equivalent - a staggering imbalance. Then there's the tradition and the interests of the provincial councils. Declaring a jihad on the provincial championships would trigger in response a fundamentalist rout at congress.

An alternative was to try to beef up Leinster and so scale back the disproportion. Importing Galway across the Shannon was the big idea in this regard but Connacht's only hurling entity rejected the overtures.

Ironically they're entitled to do so because the system effectively gives the county the status of a province.

Any attempt to coerce Galway would be opposed by all of Connacht and congress dislikes taking decisions that are seen to pick on individual units. So that got dropped. The rest was plain sailing.

Restricting the Liam MacCarthy Cup intake to 12 counties is like confining the Booker Prize to the literate. There has never been a senior intercounty hurling championship that was remotely within the realistic grasp of a dozen counties - and if there is in my lifetime I'll happily give them all medals.

The idea of encouraging less successful counties with the prospect of championships pitched at a feasibly competitive level is a good one. The trouble may be in getting them all to take it seriously. For whatever reason counties - in either code - seem to prefer the perennially forlorn pursuit of a "surprise" result to winning something among their peers.

For a few years in the early 1990s the All-Ireland B football bucked the trend but mostly because two first two winners, Leitrim and Clare, were able to use it as a springboard for winning provincial titles. Once the promise of upward mobility faded, so did enthusiasm for the competition.

There is provision for the winners of the Ring/Rackard/Mackey Cup to be promoted to the MacCarthy group every year but it's not hard to envisage elevated counties returning shell-shocked a year later with their ambition blunted.

But the raising of standards in non-hurling counties will be another year's task for the HDC - and a far more daunting one than 2003s.