This weekend is go time at the bottom of Division Two of the football league. You either shape up now or you become prime candidates to get shipped out. The bottom four teams face each other, with Offaly playing Down on Saturday evening in Newry and Meath hosting Cork in Navan on Sunday. Winning won't save anyone but losing almost certainly means Division Three next year.
In any other season, of course, this would be of strictly limited interest. There's niche and then there's Division Two relegation battle niche. Except that in 2022, for the first time, the league is linked to the championship and relegation from Division Two means your summer is more likely to end in the soon-to-be-birthed Tailteann Cup than it is in the Sam Maguire. So what these four teams do this weekend will echo in, if not quite eternity, then at least in May and June.
All of which undeniably juices the pot a little heading into this round of games. In an alternative universe, the GAA would be making a big production of letting everyone know what’s at stake, putting on a show for their new competition, gathering up those precious eyeballs for the journey to come. The road to the Tailteann starts here! But as we know, that’s not really how things are done.
In the GAA’s defence, it’s a tricky proposition. Everyone says that the Tailteann Cup won’t take off without proper marketing but that only raises the question of exactly what proper marketing looks like. How do you sell a competition that teams are actively trying to avoid playing in?
John Maughan knows that for all money, his Offaly team are prime Tailteann Cup candidates. They got promoted to Division Two from last year's truncated Covid league, in all honesty probably a season ahead of schedule. Thanks to their glorious All-Ireland under-20 team, they faced a problem in January and February that no Offaly side since the 1980s had to deal with when 11 of Maughan's squad played in the Sigerson Cup.
They have had to work their way around injuries, much-needed physical development and a postponement that will have caused them to play five weekends in a row before the end of the month. All of it washes out with them bottom of the table with a single point from four matches.
“So we haven’t really had the time to dwell on what the consequences for the championship are going to be or what relegation is going to mean,” Maughan says. “But I am very much aware of the Tailteann Cup obviously and there is certainly an element of me that thinks that playing lots of championship football during the summer months might be good for us in terms of development.
“But am I going to stand up at training and go, ‘Hey lads, I want us to be in Division Three so we can get a run of games in the summer’? No, definitely not. If you wanted to make it into a dilemma, you could. But no, we are very passionate about trying to retain our Division Two status.
“Because I know that it certainly improves players when they get to play against better opposition week on week. We benefit enormously from playing the Derrys, the Roscommons, the Corks and so on. We are able to benchmark ourselves against them and we would dearly love a second season of playing against them if that were possible.”
This is the GAA’s conundrum laid bare. Maughan is in favour of the Tailteann Cup. He sees it as a healthy part of the future for loads of counties. He wants it to work. He just doesn’t want his team to be playing in it this summer. More to the point, he doesn’t want his players paying it any heed unless and until they have to.
“The language you use as a manager is so important and you’ve got to be so careful. Going into any particular game, you have to be so clear on what your objectives are. The modern intercounty footballer is a smart, intelligent guy, much more so than my vintage were. So it’s critical how you communicate with them.
“In that respect, when you’re getting ready for a crucial away game in Newry against Down, you can’t allow any talk of the Tailteann Cup to seep in. There’s no way anyone is saying, ‘Right lads, the Tailteann Cup, let’s go and win it.’ Not at this time of year with big games every weekend. Certainly not. We have Down this weekend, Roscommon the week after and Cork the week after that. We’re going week to week, trying to manage the load, trying to manage the bodies.”
Language matters out in the world too, of course. With every pejorative reference to the Tailteann Cup, it becomes that little bit more difficult to promote. None of the teams at the bottom of Division Two or at the top of Division Three have any hope of winning Sam Maguire. Nobody from any of the counties pretends otherwise.
But although they would all be among the favourites for the Tailteann Cup, so much of the talk around this stage of the league is couched in terms of trying to avoid ending up in the second-tier competition. When in fact the reality of relegation to Division Three is that whoever drops down will significantly improve their chances of ending the year with silverware.
“We have to remove the type of language that talks the competition down,” Maughan says. “We shouldn’t allow it to be perceived as a loser’s competition. I get that relegation from Division Two brings with it an entry into the Tailteann Cup but I think you can talk about them as two separate things. Offaly want to stay in Division Two, that’s our main objective. But by saying that, I don’t want to come across as talking down the Tailteann Cup at all.
“That’s why I don’t like any talk of the ‘Tailteann trapdoor’ or anything like that when it comes to relegation from Division Two. Relegation is relegation and everyone wants to avoid it. But if you tag it like that, players automatically start to attach a stigma to it and as soon as they lose in the provincial championship they just have the mindset of, ‘That’s it, we’re out.’ But they’re not. There’s still something to win. The point is, you have to make it worth winning.”
This is the rub for the GAA. While allowing for it being an awkward marketing project, generating some sort of positive buzz around the Tailteann Cup is by no means impossible. They could begin by committing to an All Stars scheme. Source a sponsor for it, announce the judges, declare that the year will end with a trip abroad for the winners. Decree that all tickets to all games up to the final will cost a tenner - at a push let the semi-finals be €15.
Portion off the broadcast rights and make one of the stations your go-to home of the Tailteann Cup. As it stands, it's believed that RTÉ will only have room in the schedules for live coverage of the two semi-finals and the final - three games out of a possible 17. The national broadcaster will presumably take the usual torrent of abuse but what option do they have? Drop a provincial hurling final to make space for a Tailteann quarter-final? Unlikely.
At least if the competition had a dedicated broadcast partner, they could make a meal of it. They could be starting to bang the drum on it right now, long before anyone knows or cares who will be involved. A weekly Tailteann Countdown show tracking the league progress of the contenders, local reporters giving insights into players most football followers know nothing about. Make it somebody’s responsibility to get people interested.
None of that has happened. It may well do next year, when there is the possibility of broadcast contracts being redrawn with the onset of the new championship structures. But here and now, it seems that there will be nothing too surprising or innovative about the promotion of the Tailteann Cup. A weekend like this which will have major implications for the make-up of the competition is allowed to pass without any official nudge from the association that something interesting might be afoot.
For Maughan and Offaly, Saturday is a crucial road trip. They got their mojo going in fits and starts last week against Galway, rattling in three goals against probably the division’s best team. Win on Saturday night and they have a chance of staying up, with games against Roscommon and fellow strugglers Cork to come. And if not, and if the summer brings the Tailteann, so be it.
“The more games lads can play at a good level, the more intercounty games they can play together, the better,” says Maughan. “Summer weather, building up patterns of play, relationships on the pitch and off it - all of that is for the good. There is an attraction in that. The Tailteann Cup deserves to be embraced by the teams that are in it. I hope it is looked upon in a positive way.
“And at the same time - I hope we’re not there!”
