Over the past couple of days, a number of concerns have started to circle overhead around Croke Park. None of them are particularly new but there are signs that they will have to be addressed and in a way they are interlinked.

The depressed state of football was illustrated in different ways by both matches at the weekend. The mismatch in Connacht followed a similar provincial final in Munster and each event made a mockery of the provincial system's ability to provide genuine All-Ireland quarter-finals. The Leinster final was a genuinely competitive affair but some of the reactions it triggered were excessive.

Tightly-contested and exciting are fine qualities - particularly in a season which has often lacked such characteristics - but a match as error-ridden as Sunday's, which lacked an even competent level of marksmanship, can hardly be put down as a treasure for posterity.

Martin Carney's comments in this newspaper yesterday were well made. This has been a disappointing football championship. For whatever reasons and despite the higher-than-usual quota of surprise results, the season has been flat. It may yet be redeemed by the remaining matches but for the first two and a half months there's been little to raise the spirits.

News that the Croke Park redevelopment is exceeding its budget was predictable in the sense that the project is anything up to 10 weeks behind schedule. But it was also a grim reminder of the financial commitments such a huge undertaking entails.

Departing GAA finance officer Frank Tierney's reference to the running of the stadium and his cautiously-expressed disagreement with the failure to make executive appointments last year underlines the fact that, as constituted at present, Croke Park administration would be poorly equipped to run the fully-redeveloped stadium.

Essentially the GAA is an organisation whose success has outgrown its structures. President Sean McCague's strategic review of the association's workings can't come to its conclusions quickly enough if a sensible administration is to be found before the GAA does itself major damage by relying on a voluntary, amateur committee system fused onto a full-time headquarters of understaffed departments and overburdened executives.

The one thread linking all of these cavils is that of the GAA's underachievement in making the best of their situation as the biggest sports organisation in the country in terms of both participation and audience interest. Its governance hasn't evolved at anything like the rate required to keep track of the changing world or indeed its own ambitions.

Football and hurling championships are part of the overall equation. They are Croke Park's main product both for the generation of revenue through the interest of followers and for the promotion of the games as a recruitment tool. So when they are run in as unbelievably haphazard and irrational a manner as they are at present the association as a whole suffers. The success of the product enables all the grant-aiding and games development to take place.

The provincial system is strangling the potential of the games. Aside from the geographical inequalities which mean that Galway have either been unfairly penalised or unfairly advantaged by a stress-free run to the All-Ireland semi-finals, there is the quality of the product.

The regionalised straitjacket of the provincial championships boasts as a strength the local rivalries of neighbouring counties. But these mean nothing unless the teams are of the similarly competitive nature which means they would meet in an hierarchical system anyway.

In other words Dublin and Kildare could have drawn many more than the 50,000 who turned up on Sunday because the teams are evenly matched, not because they are neighbours. For instance, how many turned up when they played each other in the 1989 championship in Newbridge? A little fewer than 15,000.

Similar arguments have been made in relation to the hurling championship and its lack of any discernible life north of the Dublin-Galway line (pace Derry's stirring performance last month), the lack of competition in Leinster and the concentration of good matches in Munster. But they apply to football as well despite the big ball game's more thorough national profile.

Both the Connacht and Munster finals were decided long before the ball was thrown in. This entails no disrespect to Clare and Leitrim who could only do their best to win the matches put in front of them but after their provincial campaigns ended it must have been hard for either to see the experience as leading them any further down the road to contenders' status.

It is believed that the Football Development Committee will recommend some sort of second chance for first-round losers in order to guarantee counties more than one match. This round of 16 - or thereabouts - may be organised on a national basis. If that is the case, it will represent a welcome departure from the provincial structure.

Although it won't guarantee competitiveness, it should end up depositing a few more competitive teams into the business end of the championship, maybe with the creation of a quarter-final stage. The problem with this format and indeed with the previous FDC's proposals is that in having to appease the provincial councils new structures are to one extent or another hamstrung from the start.

Provincial championships have long and illustrious histories and if there is a genuine commitment to them, they should be allowed continue under their own steam. But for how much longer can their internal inadequacies be allowed undermine the All-Ireland championships and the capacity of the GAA to get the best out of its assets?