Schedule on a wing and prayer as clouds still hover overhead
CHAMPIONSHIPS are up and running around the country but it feels like the relief and joy that accompanied the early club outings have been replaced by the realisation that there are dark clouds overhead and, that at any minute, it could all come crashing down.
Lockdowns in Laois, Offaly and Kildare last weekend underlined just how fragile an entire program of games is, while in Clare, they are redrawing fixture timelines after the Cratloe club were hit by a Covid outbreak.
“There was no way any club was being left behind,” Clare PRO Michael O’Connor said.
It was an admirable show of solidarity from the clubs of Clare but assuming that similar scenarios will be repeated around the country, already hard pressed fixture makers will have a loaves and fishes job on their hands.
Timelines were already incredibly tight but a Covid interruption leaves them with an even more difficult task. There are plenty of games to play but not enough weekends to play them in. At least not on this side of the scheduled return to intercounty action.
So they’ll have to get creative and come up with different ways to complete their championships. Laois have led the way in that regard and are already toying with the idea of not playing their two remaining national football league matches to give the clubs more space.
“The league is not a primary competition,” Laois secretary Niall Handy said.
“We’d be open to deferring it possibly, but our primary concern has to be our club championships.”
Mike Quirke’s footballers are stuck in mid-table in Division Two. And two wins or a pair of defeats would put them in either the promotion or relation picture. Under normal circumstances that would be unthinkable but then these are unthinkable times.
That’s a scenario Croke Park would be keen to avoid given the knock-on effect of Laois handing walkovers to
Westmeath and Fermanagh would have for the rest of the division. But in even toying with the idea, it shows how far officials might have to go to get their local club championships played to conclusion.
So old ideas that had previously been dismissed could be revisited. A number of counties had tinkered with the idea of playing their finals or even semi-finals after the county’s interest in the championship had ended.
That idea was rejected, with the majority of counties releasing plans that had their county championships wrapped up by late September and before the county side returned to action. It was neater and tidier to have the club action wrapped up in
one block of action.
But that could be looked at again. Playing the latter stages of the club championship after a county had exited the championship isn’t ideal but it could fast become one of the few workable conclusions if counties run into further delays.
The nature of both the hurling and football championships means that most counties will be out of the running early on. Football is straight knockout while hurling has a back door but with every passing week, more and more sides will be out of the running.
Counties will start dropping out of the race for Liam MacCarthy on the weekend of November 7/8. By that same weekend seven counties will be out of the Leinster football championship and free to return to club business. Two teams will be standing in Connacht and Munster while Ulster will be down to the final four.
The down side is that club players will have to train through the county season. It’s far from ideal but the likelihood is that players would be happy to keep training in preparation for a county semi-final or final. And it removes some of the immediate pressure on fixture makers.
And if scenarios like what we have seen recently in Clare, Laois, Offaly and Kildare become more commonplace, the reality is those fixture makers are going to need all the time they can get.