Weaker sides need their own Super 8s competition
THE football Championship goes through a seismic change this weekend when the Super 8s gets onto the starting grid in Croke Park.
Tyrone, Roscommon, Dublin and Donegal will herald the start of what is, in effect, another qualifier system.
Each team will get three chances to make the All-Ireland semi-final.
It is the most momentous shift in the structure of the Championship since the introduction of the back-door system back in 2001. At the time, that was viewed as a way to give all teams at least two games every summer.
It was believed to be a move to help the so-called weaker counties, by extending their Championship season beyond just one game. However, it turned out that the system provided more assistance to the big guns.
If they were ambushed early in the provincial championship, they were able to recover through the back door.
Galway won the All-Ireland title through the qualifiers in its very first year. And Kerry (twice), Tyrone (twice) and Cork all followed suit, taking advantage of their second chance.
There is no doubt as to who the Super 8s will benefit. There is nothing in this festival of football, which will take the game to every corner of the country over the next month, for the smaller counties. This is all about the elite, the crème de la crème in Gaelic football.
Since the advent of the AllIreland quarter-finals in 2001, nine counties (Offaly, Longford, Carlow, Louth, Wicklow, Antrim, Leitrim, London and Waterford) have never reached them while five (Cavan, Tipperary, Clare, Limerick and Wexford) have only made that stage once. That’s almost half the teams contesting the Championship who have very little hope of being involved in the new competition.
The Super 8s is going to reinforce the divide that is already there between the strong and the weak. Not only that but it will eliminate the possibility of a big team getting ambushed at the quarter-final stage as has happened a number of times before. Big upsets such as Fermanagh beating Armagh in 2004, Wexford beating Armagh in 2008, Down beating Kerry in 2010 and Tipperary beating Galway in 2016 will now be a thing of the past.
A big team might have one off-day, they won’t have two.
It is vital the GAA use this opportunity to create a proper, incentivised second-tier championship in football. The chance presents itself with the Super 8s and I was glad to see GAA President John Horan say he supports inserting tiers into the Championship.
It needs buy-in from all the teams. It needs rewards and incentives — and a clear pathway to get up the ladder and challenge for Sam Maguire, maybe not in the same year but within a couple of years.
There are 24 teams now confined to being spectators. There’s no point in county boards playing their club championships because the provincial club championships won’t start for months and a lot of players are in the States.
Wouldn’t it make more sense if the second-tier counties had their Super 8 competition? And play the final of it as the curtain-raiser on All-Ireland final day. Give the counties their own All-Star team, who could even play the other All-Star team as a way to promote the game.
It would expand the festival of football that kicks off this weekend and would be far more inclusive. At the moment, with so many counties rarely getting to the quarter-final stage, the Super 8s already feels like a bit of a closed-shop.
As for the festival of football itself, I think Kildare have the best chance of being a dark horse and upsetting the odds. What will make it hard for teams like Kildare, Roscommon and Monaghan in the groups is that they will have to pull off two shocks to reach a semi-final.
The winner of Roscommon’s clash with Monaghan tomorrow will get an enormous boost in advance of their crack at the big guns of Kerry and Galway.
Kildare have illustrated once again, the importance of mental strength, resilience and mind over matter in the way they have transformed their season in a few short weeks. The big question now is are they as good as they looked against Mayo and Fermanagh or as bad as they looked against Carlow?
And the Lilywhites will get a more forensic examination against both Galway and Kerry. Prior to that, the Connacht and Munster champions will have asked questions of each other. These two look to have a slight edge in this group, at least on paper, but opinions may be changed by tomorrow evening.
The other group looks like Dublin with AN Other. A few weeks ago, I would have thought that would be Donegal but Paddy McBrearty’s loss is huge and if any team can take advantage of that, it could be Tyrone
They are playing with a more attacking style with Conor McAliskey, Niall Sludden and Peter Harte creating more opportunities than they did last year. And converting them.
Tyrone’s big advantage over the likes of Monaghan and Roscommon is that they have a recent tradition of contesting All-Irelands.
Even allowing for what happened last year against Dublin, Tyrone will not be out of their depth if they get into a semifinal or final this year.
One side-effect of the Super 8s will be that the provincial championship will be further diluted. There is plenty of merit in Declan Bonner’s suggestion this week that the provincial champions should start their Super 8 campaign with a home game. There has to be some sort of reward for winning the title.
In years to come, younger GAA fans will look in disbelief at a time when teams could win the All-Ireland having only played three games, as Kerry did more than 40 years ago.
This already feels like a closed shop