Forum discusses local GAA fixtures calendar

IT’S going to be a brave new world for the GAA in 2018. The club forum we saw last Friday evening in Tralee and the changes to club championship activity envisaged are directly a result of the changes being rung at national level.

The GAA can no longer be accused of being a conservative organisation as the changes being brought into effect for next season are dramatic indeed. Last week the GAA revealed its master fixtures programme for next season and, while most people expected change, perhaps the scale of it was more dramatic than most people anticipated.

The move of the Munster final to a Saturday evening might be, shall we say, non-traditional, but it’s a relatively minor change in comparison with the other changes on the way.

The National League is due to start a week earlier – Kerry play host to Donegal in Fitzgerald Stadium on January 28. A big change comes with the fact of the National Hurling League starts on the same weekend.

As a matter of fact dual weekends – football and hurling – are set to become the norm rather than the exception in the years ahead. The Division 1 hurling final – the weekend of March 25 – will coincide with the last round of the football league for instance.

The leagues will be wrapped up a lot sooner than in previous years – by the first weekend of April, when the Division 1 and 2 finals are due to take place. The rest of the month of April will – as discussed elsewhere on this page – be free for club activity.

Then the Tier 2 hurling championship, which the Kerry hurlers will compete in, gets underway at the beginning of May which will likely rule out the month for club activity, besides the senior footballers will then be in the teeth of their preparations for championship, which gets underway at the beginning of June.

The Kingdom are due to face Clare or Limerick in the Munster championship semi-final on June 2 in Fitzgerald Stadium, with the final to follow on June

23. Should Kerry lose that game –likely to be in the new Pairc Uí Chaoimh – they would be out a fortnight later in the final round of the qualifiers (the weekend of July 7/8).

Were Kerry to qualify for the new quarter-final Super 8s they would be in action over three of the following four weekends (the weekend of July 14/15, the weekend of July 21/22 and the bank holiday weekend of August 4/5/6).

And while all this activity is taking place at senior level the underage championships will be well underway. The Under 21 football semi-finals are down for July 14/15 and the final for August 4/5/6 (coinciding with the last round of the Super 8s)

In hurling Kerry will again compete in the B competition for the Richie McElligott Cup, starting on June 7.

The minor football quarter-finals are due to be played are due to be played on July 28/29 with the semi-finals retaining their traditional curtain-raiser role before the All Ireland semi-finals and final.

The All Ireland semi-finals will be played over one weekend with one on Saturday, August 11 and the other on Sunday, August

12. The final is due to be played three weeks later on Sunday, September 2.

All in all it represents a huge disruption to the way things have been done, but it will mean more time for club activity, albeit in more clustered periods of time. It’s up to the County Board executive and delegates to decide how best to make use of it in the weeks ahead.

It won’t necessarily be easy.