Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Minefield in Ulster for Paddy
DOWN boss Paddy Tally reckons the revised football Championship structure isn’t fair on Ulster teams who must march through a ‘minefield’.
Cavan and Monaghan will need four wins to claim the Ulster title – compared to teams in other provinces needing just two.
Furthermore, Ulster has three Division 1 teams and three Division 2 teams, which contrasts quite sharply with other provinces.
Speaking to the ‘Load of Balls’ podcast about the setup, Tally said: “I wouldn’t be overly delighted, I think this was a missed opportunity.
“I think in the year it was, this was the opportunity to throw it open.
“The reason we moved away from the old system was to increase the level of opportunity and fairness throughout the country.
But we’re back to that again. It seems a retrograde step in my opinion.
“Okay, we are constrained by the pandemic and the way things are this year.
“But I felt the GAA just went back too quickly to the older system without exploring, ‘Was there an easier way to do this?
Could we have done this with an open draw system?’.
“Because really the
Ulster Championship becomes a minefield and a battlefield now.
“We look across Ireland and we see that some teams win two matches and are in an All-ireland semifinal whereas in Ulster you possibly have to win four.
“The amount of teams in Division 1 in Ulster, compared to the amount of teams in Division 1 in other provinces, it doesn’t (equate). It isn’t really fair.
“Maybe they had their reasons. Probably a lot of that might have been purely administration, let the provincial councils look after their own competitions, from a planning and organisation point of view and maybe getting venues organised.”