Jim McGuinness: The football championship should be a raw knockout competition, not this

On a quiet weekend for Gaelic football, much of the focus and talk was on the Champions League decider in Istanbul and the epic provincial hurling finals closer to home.

Still, on Saturday evening I sat down to watch two Tailteann Cup games – Carlow against New York and Down against Longford.

And it got me thinking about the tiered system and why different approaches to structuring the Sam Maguire and Tailteann Cup might be required – bringing back the rawness of knockout championship football for the last 16 in the All-Ireland, while continuing to provide counties in the Tailteann Cup an opportunity to develop and grow.

It was particularly interesting to see the sizeable crowd at Carlow’s Tailteann Cup game against New York in Dr Cullen Park at the weekend. I was taken by the attendance, because this year is a bit of a litmus test for the competition.

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In 2022, Carlow’s championship experience (including two games in a straight knockout Tailteann Cup) amounted to three outings. Indeed, Carlow played a total of just seven championship games between 2019 and 2022.

But when Niall Carew’s side run out to face Antrim next weekend, it will be their sixth championship game this summer. They will have played double the number of games this year than they did in 2022, and nearly as many in one season as they managed over the last four.

I think that really goes to the heart of what the Tailteann Cup is meant to be about and why it is such an important developmental competition for those so-called weaker counties. Six games is a strong run, from a coaching point of view it allows you to understand your players, to develop systems of play and put your own fingerprint on it in terms of the style you want to harness.

Players get the opportunity to understand their team-mates better, fitness and conditioning levels improve and there is the capacity to blood new players. Carlow are now just one game away from playing at Croke Park, and they would arrive there with six championship games in the bank.

Between 2022 and this year, in terms of development, there is no comparison. And if you extrapolate that over three years, five years, 10 years, the potential for growth is huge.

The better teams progress year on year because they get more games, more opportunities, they play deeper into the summer, which in turn is a benefit to them at the start of the following season.

[ Tailteann Cup draw: Cavan to face Down in quarter-finals ]

Until now the opposite has been true for the weaker counties, their seasons ended early while their more successful counterparts got to experience big championship days at the height of summer. The gap was constantly widening.

So, why was there a decent crowd in Dr Cullen Park on Saturday? I think the answer is because the games are meaningful for these teams and players believe they can compete.

They see it as an opportunity to win an All-Ireland, a second tier All-Ireland but a meaningful one, nonetheless. They also see it as a chance to play at Croke Park on a significant day in the championship calendar and there is the added prize of competing in the Sam Maguire the following year.

Westmeath and Cavan did the competition a great service last year by serving up a brilliant contest in the final. I was pitchside with Sky that day for what was a double header in Croke Park, and the Tailteann Cup decider was a hugely intense encounter, chaotic, raw, real championship football where the players left everything out there. It was an excellent advertisement for the competition, as were the Westmeath celebrations afterwards.

I feel players around the country looked at that, noticed how Westmeath and Cavan both embraced the challenge, and thought, I wouldn’t mind a bit of that.

In June 2015, I penned an article suggesting some possible championship restructures – many of which have come to pass. It included the idea of a two-tiered system incorporating 16 teams in each. A central tenet to that piece, and subsequent articles I wrote on the structure, was that of hope. For the format to be meaningful and provide everybody with a chance to move forward, teams needed that sense of hope. And I do feel that is present now.

Teams look at the landscape and see three main avenues open to them for progress – get to a provincial final, achieve promotion to Division Two or win Tailteann Cup outright. Those are realistic targets for many, opportunities to stake a claim to be in with the big boys while equally having a developmental competition there in which they can be genuinely competitive.

Hope for me is born out of belief, you believe you can move forward and you believe you can achieve things. Because of that, you have hope for the future. The Tailteann Cup is providing that hope.

But where does that leave the Sam Maguire?

We have two tiers and for me the opportunity is there for two different approaches in terms of structure.

The Tailteann Cup is a really strong competition for developing counties, because extra games in the group stages against counties of a similar standard are exactly what those teams need.

But the same number of games are not needed in the Sam Maguire, in my opinion. It would be better served with a round of 16 that does not involve any group format, but rather after the provincials we would move straight to a knockout All-Ireland championship.

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To achieve that, place the four provincial winners and the next four highest ranked teams from the league in Pot One. In Pot Two would be the next seven highest ranked league teams, plus the Tailteann Cup winners from the previous year.

That would leave you with eight very interesting draws and some instantly compelling fixtures. Everything would be on the line immediately and we wouldn’t be waiting weeks to eliminate teams.

We’d be bringing football back to what it was in its heyday – raw, knockout fare. You are either in or you are out on the big day, and that big day is the first day, not the fourth day.

The current structure allows for too many games to eliminate too few teams – only four sides will be knocked out of the championship after next weekend’s games.

The GAA have created a format in the Tailteann Cup that addresses the needs of the teams involved. Those counties now have hope and the possibility of seeing genuine development, but it’s important the GAA don’t stand still regarding the competition, they need to ensure every year the product on offer continues to improve.

However, there is no requirement for the two tiers in the football championship to be structured along the same guidelines.

The Sam Maguire competition doesn’t need a format incorporating group stages in the last 16. For me, it needs the safety nets to be removed and the jeopardy of knockout football to be returned.