Duffy hoping for su

Championship adventure trumps league every time

IF you forced him to choose between a solid spring campaign and a scorching summer run, Bevan Duffy would take your hand off for the latter all day long and twice on Sunday!

Managers of the so-called weaker counties place a lot of emphasis on the National League these days and their reasoning is sound and laudable.

Louth’s odds for Leinster and All-Ireland glory are 200/1 and 1000/1 respectively and even making it to Super-8s is a long-shot at 25/1.

With odds like that, the National League represents the most realistic path to silverware for the vast majority of inter-county teams, but at the very least it’s a more tangible yardstick in terms of long-term squad and player development.

But as Duffy points out, very few people will remember how your League campaign panned out if you shoot the lights out in the summer.

How did Louth fare in the League in 2010? What division were they even in? Let’s just say that by mid-July of that fateful summer, no-one remembered, or cared!

After Louth’s dreadful 2018 spring campaign, Duffy’s hoping for a similar outcome this summer.

‘In recent years we had decent league campaigns followed by poor summer runs, but I’ll tell you one thing if someone told me at the end of the year you’d be looking back on a poor oul league and a great run in the summer you’d take it every day of the week.

‘Summer football and Championship football is what you train for,’ he said. ‘The national leagues have take on added significance in recent years, but championship football, training on the long evenings, that’s what you play football for.

‘It’s been a long winter, as we all know, so it’s been six months of slogging away in the cold and muck and darkness. The last few weeks it’s brightened up and the grass is cut and there’s a bit of a buzz about the place. You’re not head-to-toe in skins, you’re out on the pitch in a jersey and shorts. That’s what’s it’s all about, that’s