The Connacht final in Salthill last Sunday was a joy. It was a raucous atmosphere, a game with a ton of turnovers, some great scores, big personalities showing up at key moments, and individual battles that swung one way and then the other.
What it wasn’t, was a comprehensive answer to the doubters around the provincial championships. But it would be nevertheless instructive to interrogate just why it was so good.
Making the draw for the All-Ireland championship group stages before the four finals were played ensured the actual scheduling benefits of winning or losing the Connacht final were negligible when taken at face value.
But for two teams who are still, for all the entertainment they served up, probably not in the three-team top rank of counties favoured to win the All-Ireland, it was a piece of silverware that they could target and aim towards and celebrate winning.
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There are five cups handed out every summer, each county can only win two of them, and Galway and Mayo fought it out to the death for the first of those. And it goes without saying that the defeat would have stung a lot less, and the win would have tasted a lot less sweet, if it had been against other opposition.
Similarly this weekend, Donegal and Armagh are intimately acquainted with each other. Donegal’s wins over Derry and Tyrone already this year are important not just because of progression in the championship, but because of the years of personal enmities and rivalries that only provincial competition can create.
Galway/Mayo means something because they’ve been playing each other since 1902, and more importantly because they’ve been marrying each other and working alongside each other for even longer than that. The same goes with every local rivalry, whether currently dormant, or still firing.
It seems like a pity to throw all of that away, even if the inequities in the standard of the four provinces make it competitively unfair in the context of an All-Ireland championship still shaped around them. Scheduling the provincials for January and February is just another way of killing them off by stealth.
I believe there’s another way. The opening weekend of the football championship should also be the opening round of the All-Ireland group stages. Ensure that Kerry and Dublin aren’t allowed to build slowly through the first couple of months of championship due to the weakness of their local rivals.
If Derry or Mayo have to be ready to go straight away after the end of the league, then so too should Dublin and Kerry. Play the four championships then throughout the season, like the FA Cup in England, sprinkled into the fixture list every couple of weeks.
The provincial quarter-finals can be on the May Bank Holiday, the semi-finals on the June Bank Holiday weekend, and the finals in the first week of July. Experiment with Friday night games, stagger throw-in times, price the games competitively. Keep them out of Croke Park at all costs.
It would also have the benefit of buying you some extra weekends – instead of spending six weeks playing them off, you’d finish them in four (taking into account the four preliminary games in Ulster and Leinster that you’d have to play at some stage before the first of May).
Are midweek games out of the question? Those of us who spend an uncomfortable amount of time watching U-20 action on TG4, or on TG4′s YouTube channel, or on other streaming services, see opportunities there if counties can be convinced.
If you win your provincial championship, then you’re seeded number one for the following year’s All-Ireland championship. Apart from that, they have no impact on the race for Sam Maguire. The last rounds of the league then become a fierce fight to finish in the highest pot possible, and you’ll know exactly what you’re playing for, because the four winners from the previous year are already assured of Pot 1 status.
There’s none of the messing around that Down, Westmeath and more had to go through this year, waiting and waiting on results before knowing what competition they were going to be playing in – the Tailteann or the Sam Maguire.
If the big counties want to rotate team selections in their province to rest players for the All-Ireland championship, let them do it (it would at least provide a reason for them all to be carrying 40-man panels).
If your season tanks in the All-Ireland championship, then you can refocus and try to win your provincial title. It’s not nothing. Kieran McGeeney has been managing Armagh for long enough to know that an Ulster title, divorced of all other meaning, is still tangible reward for all that effort.
If provincial championships repositioned in this way in the calendar aren’t strong enough to maintain people’s interest, then so be it. They are, after all, a deeply unfair wrinkle that no other sporting organisation has to put up with.
We could continue to blame everything we think is wrong with the GAA on the split season. But I think this is worth trying. We shouldn’t give up on the idea of Galway and Mayo in Salthill on a summer’s day, with a trophy and local bragging rights on the line. I think we all have too many happy memories of days like that – days like last Sunday.
