After 20 years, we could be on brink of a revolution
IN these days of isolation, it has become a common distraction to imagine what the world might look like when this crisis is finally over. Some GAA supporters have occupied themselves this past week by imagining what the 2020 championship will look like – if it is played, at all.
For one summer only, as we feel our way back to some semblance of normality, the consensus is that a open draw, straight knock-out competition to decide the destination of Sam Maguire would be quite the novelty.
The idea of Dublin travelling to Ballybofey or Kerry having to go to Castlebar for a championship match is tickling the senses of many stuck indoors.
Even if the GAA revert to knock-out for a single season, and they may have no other choice, it will be somewhat of a departure. It will be 20 years next month when the Football Development Committee brought their proposals to GAA Congress and while roundly defeated – as they were resisted by heavyweight powerbrokers such as Frank Murphy – the two years of hard work and painstaking effort put in by the FDC wasn’t entirely in vain.
Those proposals ensured that there was finally widespread acceptance within the GAA that the idea of a team training for nine months for a single championship match was absurd. The FDC’s plan was the first time in 115 years the GAA tried to re-invent the football championship. It was a little too radical for the Association at the turn of the millennium, but one suspects that after a decade or more where we have grown tired of conversations around championship structures, they would find a more receptive audience these days.
In short, the proposals tried to incorporate the national league with the championship while retaining the provincial system. They tried to keep everyone happy, to a degree, and perhaps that was part of their downfall.
The seven top Ulster counties and four top Connacht counties would form the first group, while the seven top Leinster and four top Munster would be the next section. The third would comprise of weaker counties from all four provinces.
Played over 10 weekends, counties would play each other once in their group to determine who would make it through to the provincial semifinals. In the weaker group, the top two teams would play two of the provincial champions in an All-Ireland quarter-final.
For its time, it was almost revolutionary but it had some wind in its sails in the first couple of months of canvassing, given the calibre of person who sat on the committee, among them the late Eugene McGee, Dublin’s All-Ireland winner Robbie Kelleher and Tony O’Keeffe, who would go on to become chairman of the GAC.
Some of the arguments that were made are the same as we hear now, with the FDC continually returning to the point that there was not enough top-class inter-county football played between March and September to satisfy public demand.
‘April and May usually provide only a handful of attractive games while August and September provide just two All-Ireland semi-finals and a final,’ the report pointed out. Not too much has changed in 20 years.
And the committee also claimed that there was a huge group of players who were finding it harder to justify all their time spent on the training field for the amount of championship games that they played.
A few weeks before Congress, it looked like the proposals might get the majority required. Aristocratic counties like Kerry, Down and Cavan came out in support. But as ever in the world of GAA politics, by the time the proposals reached Congress floor, concern about where the club player fitted into the plan saw the wind blowing in a different direction.
Six months later, at a Special Congress in Citywest, delegates finally adopted a new structure for the football championship, which opened the back door for teams beaten in their own provinces. Páraic Duffy, chairman of the group who devised the qualifier system, credited the work of the FDC, even if what was ultimately voted through was a watered-down version of the original radical plan.
As one of the members of the FDC would later reflect, their proposals were subjected to six months of debate, and turned inside-out while the qualifier system was allowed to pass through, generating little conversation. Now, in a time of reflection and when we may have to go back to what we once knew, if only for one season, it is worth thinking what the GAA might have missed by not agreeing to the FDC’s proposals
‘Arguments are same as those made today’