Opening matches of the All-Ireland championship are rarely crowd pullers, but is this the eternal problem of all championships or can the GAA tighten up the season, asks KEITH DUGGAN

THE GAA is a great organisation for contradictions. The All-Ireland championship – the national pastime of Ireland’s drenched summers – was launched during the week, but there are no championship matches this weekend.

It offers further fuel to those who feel that the championship is too long, too slow and that it needs to announce itself in more spectacular fashion. In fact, the football competition got underway 3,000 miles away in the Bronx last weekend. As a match, Galway and New York was over-shadowed by the National Hurling League final and the All-Ireland Under-21 football final between Dublin and Donegal. It was pushed even further down the ratings scale by what was a gargantuan weekend in rugby, with three of the four Irish provinces making appearances in European semi-finals.

It turned out that the opening match of the All-Ireland championship could have caused one of the biggest shocks of all time, with the exiles pushing Galway until the very closing minutes of the match. But that fixture has always been about honouring the expatriates. In terms of the publicity here, it is practically an invisible fixture. Galway now have a staggering two months to wait until their Connacht semi-final against Sligo. Such a huge delay is another criticism levelled at the GAA about the championship. There are just five matches in the Connacht football championship and yet it runs from early May until mid July. Why can’t the provincial competitions be run off more neatly? And why can’t the All-Ireland championship open with a classic? Why can’t the GAA open their summer with a box office match?

The Leinster football championship opens next week with Carlow versus Wicklow, an interesting game with localised rather than national appeal. Kerry, the champions, open against Tipperary.

Anything other than a victory for the favourites is, for all the progress Tipperary have made under John Evans, unthinkable. In Ulster, the meeting of Armagh and Derry is fascinating but Ulster football has never been fashionable.

The GAA have heard these grievances before but don’t expect a change any time soon. “We have heard these arguments but most of them are far too simplistic. It is entirely up to the provincial councils how they run their championships,” points out Fergal McGill, operations manager for the GAA.

“The delegates do sit down together on the CCCC so there is interaction and communication between them. People ask: ‘why can’t we open with, for example, Dublin and Meath?’ It ignores the fact you can’t play a semi-final before a first round. In a knock-out competition, you go with the roll of the dice and first rounds and preliminary rounds are played on that basis.

“People are going to point to the World Cup next month as an example of how to kick of a tournament with a bang. But the World Cup finals are akin to the All-Ireland series. It is forgotten just how long the qualification process took for that tournament. Two years! Also, most cup competitions, by definition, start off and gradually build to the finale,” he says.

It is a fair point. All knock-out tournaments, from Wimbledon tennis to snooker, rely on a slow-burning sense of anticipation and the fact at the end of everything, the best two competitors will meet. But from a marketing point of view, the GAA structure is not ideal. The championship has become a huge television event. For RTÉ the congested nature of the qualifiers means it is impossible to designate outside broadcast units to every single match – although the broadcaster did manage to have a camera at every match for the past three years.

Once the qualifiers are decided, the All-Ireland series settles into a more leisurely format, with the quarter-finals and semi-finals played out through late July and August before the final is played in September. By then, it seems as if the championship has been on the road for a long, long time.

“It is in the absolute interest of RTÉ that Gaelic Games stands at the centre of its summer sports schedules but we need to ensure as well that it competes at the highest level with international sports,” says Glen Killane, head of sport at RTÉ.

“The key is how to schedule some games . . . it is not just about attracting an audience to RTÉ, although that is obviously important from a commercial point of view. It is about how best to market the games.

“Take the Saturday evening slots, they are already established but have huge potential in terms of scheduling very big games. It is no coincidence that Champions League games, which draw huge audience figures across Europe, start at 7.45pm. The GAA is a summer competition and on a Sunday afternoon, any sport has to provide a compelling reason to bring people indoors to watch a match.”

Some GAA people believe it is time to abandon the provincial system in favour of an open draw or a “Champions League” format that would allow the manipulation of schedules, guaranteeing that the championship could start off with, say, Dublin against Derry and a full house in Croke Park.

The problem is that nobody has come up with a satisfactory replacement to the old provincial system. And another problem is that by removing the provincial championships, teams have only one prize to play for – the All-Ireland. And few teams have a realistic chance of winning that.

Also, many gripes about the current championship system overlook the requirements of the club teams. As McGill points out, it is not as if there is no football being played in Ireland when the county teams are not playing. “Club games need to keep going. The vast majority of our players are affiliated to clubs, not county.”

When the qualifying era was ushered in, it seemed like the solution. In the beginning, the qualifying games produced novel match-ups, with counties who had never met in the All-Ireland suddenly going at it hammer and tongs. But in recent years, the crowd numbers have fallen and after the long drawn-out months of May and June, there is suddenly a glut of qualifying games to get through in July. It feels as if the qualifiers are rushed through.

The qualifiers run a contrary rhythm to the settled, gradual build-up of the old-fashioned straight knock-out system. They are based around an intense burst of productivity, a knock-out competition contained within the overall competition and such is the overwhelming schedule of games that very attractive fixtures can get lost in the crowd.

The qualifying system can provide a headache for RTÉ but the fear that the broadcaster wants to push through a fundamental change is misplaced. “We want to see just as many live games and as many counties as possible appearing in those games,” Killane says. “The last thing we want to change is what has made the GAA great.”

For now, the All-Ireland will continue to being in its own leisurely way and at its own slow-fast-slow pace. “It probably would be possible to condense the season,” responds McGill. “But there would be a real risk there in terms of promotional value. We have from May to September to showcase our games . . . that is relatively short. Spreading the games out has its advantages. GAA fans are unique in that they follow their own counties but they also follow the sport. They will go and see other counties play when their county is not in action or even when they are knocked out. That is a big consideration for us.”

One hundred and twenty-five years and counting is its own form of security. The winter, as they say, is long enough.