THERE IS A WAY TO SAVE THIS SLOW BICYCLE RACE
AFTER listening to Davy Fitzgerald last weekend, I had to check my calendar just to make sure that I had not slept through the whole month of March.
Waterford’s defeat to Wexford ensured that next spring they will not be part of the elite seven-team Division 1A, the construct of which the GAA has hung its hat on to give the Allianz Hurling League a new sense of life.
But Davy did not seem to be too bothered by this new reality as he kept banging on about how April 21 is the only date that he and his players are focused on.
It got me spooked straight away so I rushed to the calendar in fear that somehow a month had passed unbeknownst to me, and I was comforted to find that we were still in mid March.
These days, with legacy head injuries, you can never be too careful…
But Davy has only eyes on the future, revealing that he has one more game left in the League – at home to Kilkenny this afternoon – and two more are in the pipeline to assist in his build-up to the 2024 Munster championship.
It begs a rather obvious question: why does Davy need a couple of extra challenge games, when he was given five competitive games in the first instance which evidently he was not going to lose any sleep over?
And there is the problem with the League. It is a competition in name only to the point that teams up and down the land would rather play a couple of challenge games behind closed doors than front up and give their absolute best in the GAA’s secondary competition.
So, this is now how the GAA intercounty calendar works. There are pre-season competitions in January whose only function is to prepare teams for the Allianz League, whose primary function is to prepare teams for the behind-closeddoor challenge game circuit which is used to prepare for the Championship. Confused? Well, join the club. It is a disgrace that the League is treated in such a shoddy manner but there is nothing new in any of this, given that it has long been indistinguishable from the mud on the soles of the players’ boots.
It was heading that way even before it went from being the secondary competition to being the secondary league, once the Munster and Leinster championships went down the round robin route in 2018. Once the GAA went down that road, the league was doomed and it amazed me at the time – and it still does – that Allianz continues to lend its good name to a competition that hardly qualifies for being second-best these days.
Croke Park is deluding itself – although there is nothing new in that – if it believes that by creating this new seven-team top tier that teams are going to bust a gut to stay there.
In fact, some might even find it more attractive to drop down a level so they would not have to ‘show their hand’ in the spring, which is the kind of gross overthinking that has gone a long way from taking a game that was played on grass to one played on a computer.
The obsession in intercounty hurling at the elite level – and it is one driven by the egos of managers and coaches – is that everyone wants to be the smartest boy in the class by holding back during the League, so they claim to have pulled a rabbit from the hat when the Championship comes along.
What they don’t seem to realise is that everyone else is at it as well and, as a result, we have to endure watching a slow bicycle race throughout the spring.
I have a proposal for how we can change that, by simply having one League instead of two.
Teams would be far less inclined to not ‘show their hand’ in the spring, if their results fed into the Championship.
For example, the points teams would garner in the League would be transferred to the Munster and Leinster championships so teams would start off the summer based on how consistently they had performed in the League.
On top of that, the winner of the League would get a bonus three points (final losers a point) along with the League trophy to ensure they would almost certainly be guaranteed a play-off place in the All-Ireland play-offs.
That would help to ensure that what happened to Waterford two years ago, when they won the League but failed to come out of Munster – which also became another stick to beat the League with – would not happen again.
Of course, people will argue that by transferring the points from the League to the Championship, it would undermine the Munster and Leinster championships. It would not have to. The preeminence of the provincial championships could be secured by awarding three points instead of two for every win (still one point for a draw) to ensure that even those who start the summer behind the black ball as a result of performing poorly in the spring can make up the ground to secure a top three berth in their provinces.
By adopting my proposal, the League’s stature would be restored, Allianz would be sponsors of a warrior sport rather than a shadow boxing festival and hurling would be given a proper showcase right through what is now a shorter season.
Above all, consistency would be rewarded rather than scoffed at by the far-too-clever boys at the back of the class.