A RETURN TO OLD KNOCKOUT WAYS IS ROMANTIC BUT IT CAN ONLY BE A QUICK-FIX OPTION
The old system of one strike and you’re out has thrilling appeal, if the alternative is no games at all, but it is a short-term fix and not a long-lasting solution
CAREFUL what you wish for. As the GAA try to equip themselves with the administrative power needed to save the summer, the possibility of knock-out Championships crystallises into probability. And that has caused great swells of nostalgia to gather in response.
Nostalgia has been one of the minor consequences of this pandemic, with some sports fans hankering after old games to sate their need for action.
The lure of the past is lost on many, but the prospect of a return to a straight knock-out GAA summer is stirring great excitement.
This is partly a function of need. People are desperate for their old lives back. For hundreds of thousands of people in this country, that means anticipating the Championship from around this time of year.
They would agree to any format put before them this morning if it meant that they would get to see games of any description between now and Christmas.
That is not guaranteed, of course, a point worth remembering as the minutiae of emergency formats are discussed.
If games can only go ahead in front of limited crowds – and that seems certain, with public health priorities likely to demand that social distancing be observed – that would present logistical difficulties.
One option that cannot be tolerated is one that would put matches behind closed doors.
That could be acceptable in professional sports. Premier League TV contracts worth billions of pounds could impel teams to play games with no fans in attendance, and the same could happen in rugby.
It would be an unconscionable move for the GAA, though.
An organisation under intense pressure as it is to maintain its status as a community body that is representative of all of its members, could not play matches without fans in attendance.
The supporters are still supposed to be the point in Gaelic games, after all.
That is a vital detail on which other plans are contingent.
Supposing, then, that the GAA manage to agree a way to organise their games with the authorities that allows at least limited access for supporters, they will not be able to run along the planned formats.
For the past two seasons, the GAA Championships have been the most expansive ever run, after all.
Since the introduction of the Super 8s in football and the institution of round-robins in the Munster and Leinster provincial hurling competitions, weekends heave with games between mid-May and the end of August.
It has had an enormous effect through every level of the GAA. To start with money, the Championships of
2019 helped the association to record levels of revenue.
There was a 16 per cent increase on the 2018 total last year, with €73.9million generated.
This was mainly down to a 22 per cent boost to gate receipts, the result of a 12 per cent increase in attendances, including a replayed football final between Dublin and Kerry. That figure is particularly startling given the revelation by director-general Tom Ryan recently, that the association could lose €60million in 2020, a loss based on no Championships being played at all. Another tremendous effect of the expanded Championship has been on team preparations. The way counties prepare for the summer has had to be overhauled, particularly in hurling.
They prepare not for one big bang opportunity, an explosive sprint for glory.
Rather, the target is to meet middle to long-distance c hallenges. This has demanded agile planning by hurling managers in particular.
Now, this bustling new world has to be abandoned, and a sparer, more urgent system is required. A knock-out format is the most logical and sensible one to be utilised at short notice.
Interestingly, the cohort central to the GAA summer – the players – would have little or no recollection of the old ways.
And while fans and some administrators grow misty-eyed at the thought of a reversion to a simpler time, it will seem inexplicable to the highly tuned stars of today, who will surely be bewildered at the sudden brutality of the format.
In conditions such as this one, the old system makes sense, but people should recognise it for what it would be: a necessary stop-gap. It is not the solution to the unworkable calendar problems assailing the games today, and causing club players deep frustration.
Between the two poles represented by the old and new ways of ordering the summer, there is the possibility of reimagining how the entire GAA year is run.
Until then, administrators must make do and mend – and that is why, almost 20 years after the introduction of the back door into football and 23 years after it was first employed in hurling, the knock-out is back.
A pivotal event in the development of the Championships came at the annual Congress of 1995, which was held in London. There, a motion readmitting teams beaten in the provincial hurling finals back into the competition was passed.
That was a crucial episode because it changed a central principle of the championships’ organising principles up to that point.
For a century, the GAA had run its competitions by one governing creed: losers were out.
This was not radical thinking, but rather a convention followed across sports.
After that Congress, there was a second chance. One bad day no
‘HIGHLY-TUNED STARS OF TODAY WILL BE BEWILDERED BY THE FORMAT’S SUDDEN BRUTALITY’
longer ruined an entire summer, scuppering months’ worth of preparations.
The change was instituted in time for the 1997 Championship, and its effects were felt that summer.
Clare beat Tipperary in the Munster final but the latter rebounded and tracked a way to the All-Ireland final, where Clare were waiting and defeated them again.
The following year, Offaly were the GAA’s first back-door champions.
In 2001, the football Championship introduced its first qualifier system, and Galway took advantage.
They lost to Roscommon in the Connacht Championship, but won the All-Ireland that September.
The effect of the second-chance in both codes removed a great deal of the risk that made the old ways thrilling.
It also rewarded better preparation, as Galway proved 19 years ago. If a county was caught out on a given weekend, they could recover and try again through the qualifiers, steeled by the shock of their first defeat.
Tyrone won All-Irelands through the back door twice, surviving defeats in the most competitive province in the sport.That illustrated another benefit of the qualifiers: it helped correct the imbalance created by uneven provinces, so where Dublin have spent a decade monstering opponents in Leinster, Ulster has remained a ruthless theatre where no weakness goes unexposed.
All subtlety is lost with the reversion to a straight knock-out system. Again, that can be tolerated in a one-off circumstance, but it needs to be remembered when the nostalgia bubbles at the thought of the old days.
Great teams had the life-spans of mayfly in those times.
The obvious example was the Ulster Championship of the 1990s.
Down won a famous All-Ireland title in 1991.
Derry beat them in 1992, Derry then beat Donegal in 1993, and
Derry themselves were beaten in their first outing as defending champions in 1994, defeated by Down in a game revered in Ulster football folklore.
That meeting is considered by many as one of the greatest games of football played anywhere, ever. It showed how much quality was packed into one province over the span of half a decade, as well as the razor edge on which teams were obliged to survive.
‘Those are the games that you sit up and think about at night,’ Fergal McCusker of Derry would say years later of the loss to Down.
‘That would haunt us.’
The consequences of that defeat for Derry also illuminate a danger of knock-out competitions. Eamonn Coleman, the remarkable character that inspired the 1993 victory, was dispensed with by the county board later in 1994, which caused huge unrest and years of ill-feeling in the county.
It is an extreme example, but it shows what can happen when counties get one chance in the Championship and fail to take it. In the vacuum that results from a sudden defeat, resentment can take hold, opinion can become severely distorted and decisions that, in retrospect, seem plainly ridiculous suddenly gather momentum.
One imagines county boards, even the higgledy-piggledy ones, would recognise the exceptional nature of any format used for 2020 and adjust their moods accordingly, but it is a point worth remembering when measures that may be introduced as a one-off are trumpeted as possible longer-term solutions.
Solutions are, of course, required to problems that existed before Covid-19 harrowed the earth.
The GAA has big problems and they tend to be connected to the effects of the inter-county game.
Tom Ryan properly raised concerns about the escalating costs of preparing teams, which almost reached €30million last year.
He said these were unsustainable – but they are also part of a circle that needs to be broken.
Managers want the best for their players, which comes at a huge cost. This obliges boards to prioritise the county team and leads many of them to submit to the manager’s demands.
These often include the postponement of club games as players are hot-housed for the use of the county exclusively. And this, in turn, sees players required to give more and more of their time to the county as managers and county boards justify the time and money devoted to just one part of the GAA architecture in a county.
A study conducted by the Economic and Social Research Institute on behalf of the GAA and the Gaelic Players Association found that inter-county commitments can take up to 31 hours of a player’s time each week.
The study used data from the 2016 season and also found that 40 per cent of players said they got no time off from GAA activity in that year.
No less than the spending on intercounty preparation, this situation is obviously unsustainable. Freeing up time for players to spend with their clubs in a less intense environment is crucial to meeting the needs of the clubs and lightening the financial burden on counties.
A knock-out Championship would leave months of free time for club action, but it would also remove an attraction that appeals to great swathes of the population – as well as reducing GAA income by a huge amount.
Supporters like a system with a second chance, as attendances have proven for two decades.
One strike and you’re out was the philosophy for a century. It worked because it was how business was always done. A new and better way has been discovered. If the old system is rushed into use in extremis, then everyone can live with that, particularly if the alternative means no games at all.
It would generate an excitement of its own, as Ireland re-emerged from a terrible period.
But it is not a long-lasting answer. The search for that must go on.