The chance to be different League has gone..i fear another long procession
TO stand still is to go backwards – and the Allianz Hurling League is now firmly in reverse.
In all aspects of life, be it personal, business, sporting or whatever, you continually look at how you can improve your lot. Or at least you should.
The GAA couldn’t be accused of taking that approach with regard to the League after last year’s edition, which was a lengthy procession before the season finally took off with the Championship.
Could the hierarchy really run around and say that last year’s League was the best version of the competition that could be served up?
Surely they couldn’t, so why then didn’t they at least tinker with it in order to make it more appealing to teams?
Before I ever pucked a ball with Limerick, I could feel that there was
an allure to the League – you only have to think of the 2009 final between Kilkenny and Tipperary when they knocked lumps out of each other.
They met in several other finals after that, all of which were memorable and rivalled some of their famous Championship meetings. Those days are long gone.
I appreciate that time moves on but so many games in last year’s League were glorified challenge games.
John Kiely commented it had been “devalued” and I totally agreed. When you have managers questioning whether they really want to reach the final of a competition or not, then something’s amiss. You could argue that Limerick were part of the
problem given their own approach to last year’s League but the way the competition was set out allowed for that to happen.
It just runs too closely to a Championship that also starts on a round-robin basis and, while the schedule is fairly cramped, even finding an extra week of a gap between League and Championship would help.
Of course, there’ll still be good crowds and we’ll all look forward to the games but we won’t get high quality fare and the level of application from the players won’t be where it should be.
Teams should be scaling down their training on the Thursday or Friday night before a League game so their performance won’t suffer at the weekend but instead they’ll going flat to the mat, with an eye on later in the year.
The long and the short of it is, there needs to be an incentive. By that, I don’t mean doling out money to the county board of the successful team because the players won’t see any of that directly.
But what if money went to a players’ fund, for a holiday or something along those lines. They need to do something. Anything.
What was there last year didn’t work and so it follows that it’s not going to work this year either.
Competitiveness is key when it comes to sport – it’s what drives standards and if you make the league competitive again you will have a higher standard of competition.
There’s no turning back now, the games will still go ahead and people will still pay their money. But we’ll all be feeling a little shortchanged.
There’ll still be good crowds but we won’t be getting high quality fare...