New league format revives many old arguments

ON GAELIC GAMES:Balancing the need for competitiveness and developmental opportunity continues to be a constant difficulty in hurling.

HAD EMILE Zola lived in contemporary Ireland and never heard of Alfred Dreyfus he would not, however, have gone short of aggrieved subjects. Many of the most heart-rending of these injustices would concern counties adversely affected by the various and frequent changes in format of the GAA’s national leagues.

Last weekend, the association’s Central Council sat down to consider the latest in these ‘refinements’ and, predictably, a great deal of protesting was the most obvious outcome.

In what constituted a surprise, the football league was left alone, apart from the unattractive grafting on to the season of a semi-final structure. Delegates were just rubber stamping the proposal having previously given it the green light – even if it took a questionable decision of last April’s congress to facilitate the reintroduction to the competition of an additional play-off round.

At a time when the wider world of Gaelic games is in a state of constant agitation at the intrusion of the inter-county season into club schedules, you would have imagined that annexing another weekend would be a hard sell. But no, the idea was adopted.

It will make for a curiously conducted Division One, half of whose eight teams will make the knock-out stages, but there you go.

The hurling decision was a more radical shift even though the game was spared the return of the semi-finals. The league will now have 12 counties in the top two divisions instead of 16.

For just four of the past 15 league seasons there has been an eight-team top division despite a belief that this format suits the game and reflects its hierarchies even more accurately than it does in football.

In those circumstances, playing in Division One was a vital aspiration, giving teams the opportunity to test themselves against the best sides in the game. For instance, Dublin’s development as a senior presence has been greatly assisted by the county’s participation – and ability to survive and prosper – in a genuinely elite division.

The desirability of being in Division One is echoed on nearly an annual basis in the piteous cries of relegated teams or those missing promotion and their anguished calls for the top flight to be expanded to nine, 10, 11 – or however many it might take to make the cut in a bad year.

Instead, Division Two has for the past three years had a denouement as edgy as Russian roulette with only the winners of the divisional final qualifying for promotion.

The man whose committee introduced that format, Ned Quinn, former chair of the Hurling Development Committee and now Kilkenny county secretary, described the first year of this promotion shoot-out in 2009 as “far more meaningful than the Division One final”.

In the event, Offaly beat Wexford to go up, just weeks before the result was reversed when the sides met in the Leinster championship. There would have been little debate at the end of the summer about which county had got itself the better outcome.

Hard as it was on the teams that lost the divisional final and found themselves consigned to another year hurling at a lower level, there was a commensurate benefit for teams at a lower level, such as those now stranded in the new Division Two, who could test themselves against the likes of Wexford Offaly and Clare.

But having the status as a helpful gauge for the likes of Carlow and Down naturally didn’t appeal to the counties in question.

“We won four of our games by an average of 20 points,” said Wexford manager Colm Bonnar of his team’s 2009 NHL season.

“That’s no good for Wexford and teams we beat, even though they’d be using Wexford and Offaly as the measuring stick of where they’re going and they’d like to see some stronger teams in there.”

This touches on an occupational problem for hurling: You can’t guarantee competitive environments for all counties without having a lot more divisions – and in all shapes and sizes – than is practicable. Bonnar’s Wexford, after all, lost their first fixture back in Division One last February by 21 points and still survived relegation.

But at least being in the top eight of the league gave an opportunity to a county to improve their game and introduce new talent to the demands of top-level inter-county hurling.

It’s easy to understand Limerick’s grievance at having apparently reached the Promised Land earlier this year, only to be informed that they’ll hurl in what looks suspiciously like the division they thought they earned the right to leave for a glittering schedule of Munster championship opponents and assorted title -holders, an ideal campaign for a developing team.

It makes the county board’s staggering ineptitude in handling the 2010 players’ dispute, which led directly to relegation, all the more costly – two seasons in exile when there might have been none.

The main justification for the new format appears to be that the season should start in March rather than February and that fewer matches would facilitate that. There’s not a huge difference between the weather in late February and early March. Hurling is best played during the summer months and any time in the spring can bring disadvantages, as showed by the monsoon at Croke Park when Kilkenny faced Dublin in April.

There is also the rationale that a 12-county top division mirrors the number of core counties contesting the Liam MacCarthy Cup, but teams in the weaker section will still face the reality of a considerable step-up come the championship.

Balancing the need for competitiveness and developmental opportunity is a constant difficulty in hurling.

The two six-team sections of Division One are at least hierarchically organised unlike the situation for most of the last decade when the counties were not seeded. This led – as did to an even worse extent the seven-team sections of 1999 and 2000 – to an abundance of meaningless fixtures, which is likely to be avoided next year.

But it remains a regressive step for Limerick and Wexford who had earned the right to play the top teams next spring.

If anything, there would have been an argument to retain the eight-county Divisions One and Two and allow a two-up and two-down movement between them or even three-county traffic each way as in 1997.

Exposing counties to a higher level of play is an important part of developing new teams and the suspicion is that the oligarchic nature of modern hurling has caused Division One to be chopped back in the interests of competition rather than development.

Whether that’s the correct approach at a time when there are plenty of green shoots emerging in a number of counties is open to question.