Westmeath called in as part of plan

News:Westmeath's readmission to the Leinster championship is part of a campaign by the provincial council to expand numbers competing for the MacCarthy Cup.

This was made clear yesterday by Leinster chair Liam O'Neill, when clarifying the invitation to the newly-crowned Christy Ring Cup winners.

O'Neill said he was surprised the Westmeath team appeared unaware they had been invited into the provincial championship for next season. Under the proposals of Croke Park's Hurling Development Committee (HDC) accepted by Congress, there is to be no promotion or relegation in this year's championship.

This meant the 2007 Christy Ring Cup winners cannot take their place in next year's MacCarthy Cup, but in an initiative agreed at the provincial hurling forum in Portlaoise two weeks ago, and with Kilkenny chair and HDC head Ned Quinn in attendance, Westmeath will compete in the Leinster senior championship in 2008.

According to O'Neill, Leinster are anxious to see some progress on one of the accepted recommendations of the 2002 Strategic Review Committee (SRC): that a number of counties be developed to the stage that they can compete in All-Ireland senior semi-finals.

"If we don't expand the number of counties at the top table, how do you develop the game?" he said.

"The idea was that six counties who hadn't reached an All-Ireland final within the previous 30 years should be resourced with a view to meeting that target within 10 years.

"If you continue to play 'up and down' with counties - one year relegated and the next promoted - and don't think bigger, what incentive do counties have to build and develop?

"If counties like Laois, Antrim or Dublin get relegated, it ruins their chances of maintaining and developing hurling, and what's more it ruins the Christy Ring, as happened with Antrim last year (when the county destroyed the opposition in the second-tier championship).

"Then in a way it would have been worse if Antrim didn't win because it would have meant that the game there had gone into a spiral of decline."

O'Neill said that Leinster would be taking their proposals to Central Council with a view to securing an expansion of the MacCarthy Cup. "In the meantime," he says, "we'll be asking that the Ring Cup winners be allowed compete next year."

That would entail an organisational headache for Croke Park, because no county was relegated this year so the end result would be 13 teams in the MacCarthy Cup and nine counties to be accommodated within the two qualifier groups.

Leinster Council are, however, entitled to organise their provincial championships as they wish, so Westmeath don't need headquarters' permission to compete in that.

Last year Westmeath, Ring Cup winners also in 2005, competed in both the Leinster championship and MacCarthy Cup - in Antrim's absence - and had a reasonably successful championship, winning one match against Dublin and hosting Kilkenny in the provincial semi-final in Mullingar before proceeding into the All-Ireland qualifiers, where Waterford also visited Cusack Park.

As the SRC proposal hasn't been acted on, the identity of the six counties to receive special developmental assistance hasn't been agreed. But O'Neill says that a number of them - Dublin, Laois, maybe Westmeath, Meath and Kildare - would probably be from Leinster, which helped prompt the provincial council's decision to pursue the matter.

"It mightn't work, but we owe it to the policy we accepted in 2002 to give it a shot. If hurling doesn't expand it's going to contract. Organisms have to continue growing or they will atrophy. We're trying to open a debate on this."