It is to be hoped that the weekend's disastrous double booking won't happen again, but in a broader sense we are probably seeing the end of an era in football. Next week's special congress will decide whether to accept the report of the intercounty fixtures work group.

If, as expected, the delegates agree, the football championship will undergo its most radical change since county teams became representative sides over 80 years ago.

In some ways, this won't be a bad championship on which to bow out for the old system. For the first time in a while, the football season has been generally better than the hurling in terms of competitiveness and decent, big matches.

It's more than 30 years since all four semi-finalists have been as closely matched and all had such feasible hopes of landing the All-Ireland. (I accept that this may flatter Leinster a bit after a provincial season which was admirably competitive, but a bit short on genuine contenders - with respect to Kildare's close battle with Galway - apart from Meath.)

The openness of this year's championship has been complemented by the success of the more adventurous teams. At the start of the summer it was envisaged in these columns that the All-Ireland semi-finals would probably provide two interesting clashes of styles - Galway-Meath and Kerry-Derry.

This didn't come to pass, but the theory held true. The more defensive and attritional traits represented by National Football League finalists Derry and Meath were largely replicated by their province's eventual standard-bearers. Armagh had greater potential for excitement than Derry, and Kildare less than Meath, but the impact was more or less the same.

Derry would have had a couple of advantages facing Kerry in that their fullback line would have been more solid and they wouldn't have been beguiled by sirencalls onto the rocks of trying to defend a lead in their own half. Then again, their forwards would probably not have been able to recover any significant leads that Kerry might have taken.

Meath would have been more of a test for Galway for the simple reason that they have quality forwards. Last year's champions may envelop and stifle opponents throughout the field, but in Trevor Giles they have football's best playmaker and in Graham Geraghty and Ollie Murphy, two of the best inside attackers and finishers - as, coincidentally, Kerry found out in last Easter's league semi-final in Thurles.

The main feature of this year's football championship has been the improvement in quality once the provincial championships were out of the way - or at least at their final stage. The Leinster final replay and Ulster final both contained passages of decent football, but otherwise, with one or two exceptions, the provincial championships were poor enough.

The situation in Connacht and Munster has been slightly forgotten because the respective champions reached the All-Ireland final, but the lack of competition is a serious issue. As long as one team in a province is a contender for major honours the overall state of its counties tends to be overlooked, but as Connacht and Ulster demonstrated at various times, most recently in the past 30 years, once all teams converge at a low level, it's very hard for a province to re-establish competitive self-respect.

This is what makes next year's likely championship so exciting. Unlike the hurling championship even in its reformed state, the football will cut across provincial boundaries and open up competition to all teams good enough to still be around in the last eight. The provincial-based tyranny which has distorted the championships for so long will finally be addressed.

The huge irony about all this is that, whereas the new format successfully subverts the provincial championships and is likely to be accepted, the proposals of the Football Development Committee were fatally weakened, principally because they went out of their way to accommodate the provinces.

As geopolitical and administrative units, the provincial councils make sense up to a point, but as competitive units they are arbitrary and unsatisfactory. It is useful to have a regional authority to which counties are answerable and which targets grants and other benefits, but there is no pressing need for this authority to dictate the structure of the championship.

What the current situation has done is prevent good teams from featuring at the high-point of the championships. An open-draw structure will occasionally throw together two good teams, but at least that caprice is dependent on an annual draw whereas the current system is built-in. Cork and Kerry can never progress together beyond July no matter what happens. Ditto Dublin and Meath, Down and Armagh, Galway and Mayo.

A more serious reservation is that, as referred to above, when the standard in a province is poor, it becomes more of a ghetto than an equal partner with other provinces.

While we can anticipate a more lively and less hidebound championship next year, one thing at least won't change. That is, of course, the parlous state of the weaker counties. To be fair to the committees charged with revamping competitive structures, there's little that can be done to make weak teams compete with strong ones. The guarantee of one extra match for a few of them is a marginal sort of improvement.

A structured system with the opportunity to compete at realistic levels and the guarantee of promotion if successful is all the GAA can offer weaker counties. After that it's up to each of the counties themselves.