Club imbalance not sustainable

MORE so probably than Rule 42, the club championships at junior and intermediate level are the crowning achievement of Seán Kelly’s presidency of the GAA. It’s opened up a whole new world to club football and to club footballers. Pride of the parish on the biggest stage of all, Croke Park under lights of a February Saturday evening or Sunday afternoon. It’s hard not to get swept in the romance of it all, even at Munster championship level. Clubs hosting games, the whole community mucking in, stewarding and all the rest of it.

In a lot of ways it’s the GAA at its most pure, but as with everything else in the GAA there are some pretty significant structural advantages and disadvantages built into the thing and they threaten to do real damage to the fabric of these competitions, particularly in football, particularly in Munster. Last weekend two Kerry teams travelled to Cork in junior and intermediate respectively and came away with more than comfortable victories – two eight point wins, which slightly flattered both sets of hosts. No great surprise there, how could there be given Kerry’s overwhelming level of dominance at this level?

In both junior and intermediate Kerry clubs have won nine of the last ten titles in each. Those exceptions very much proving the rule: Kerry clubs are miles out in front and, really, it’s the disparity between Cork and Kerry that stands out like a sore thumb. Kerry should be ahead of Cork all things considered, just not by this kind of a margin.

These championships need a more competitive Cork input. They need good games between Cork and Kerry clubs to be meaningful, but the way things are going it’s hard not to see that margin being maintained into the next decade without some changes taking place.

In the intermediate last weekend you had the ninth best team in Kerry, Templenoe, in action against the twentieth best team in Cork, Éire Óg. A Kerry club is always going to be favoured under those circumstances.

Then at junior you’ve got Kerry’s third tier against Cork’s fourth. Again that’s never going to be competitive. Maybe once in a blue moon a Cork team might triumph (Knocknagree knocking out Dromid in 2017 for instance), but it’s just not going to work long term and it’s not doing the championship itself any favours.

It’s not all Cork’s fault – although they could do with having fewer senior clubs and putting their third tier champions in the Munster junior championship – nor is it Kerry’s – for having too few senior clubs and thereby bumping up the competitiveness at intermediate and premier junior by multiples – but for the future viability of the competition compromises will have to be made. Quite what those changes would be is a particularly tricky circle to square. Counties are perfectly entitled to structure their competitions in the way that best suits them – and the structures in Kerry work a treat – if that has knock on effects in provincial and All Ireland competition in a way so be it. That’s the GAA for you. Not all counties are created equal.

It just needs to be a little more equal than this between the Munster old-firm. It can’t go on like this.