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we are now a fortnight from the first senior league game, why have fixtures not been circulated yet?

It's called the element of surprise.

Aldergrove to catch cargin in the long grass first match of the season

Any word on league starts?

7 point win away, you'd take that.

any word on club fixtures?

Magic eight-ball says "Ask again tomorrow"

Anybody know the format of football league Divisions 2 and 3...?

Sure only div 1 matters lad, thats why theres so many teams in it

So nothing from that meeting that happened on Monday?

Asked our secretary and they didn't go and heard nothing yet 

Are these proposals going to improve the standard of Division 1? answer is no. Are these proposals going to lower the standard in Divison 1? the answer is yes.
I look forward to hearing how the All Saints Chairman (member of working group) justifies his club being parachuted into Division 1 and whether he can keep a straight face while doing it.

Who else was in the working group that put this forward? I'd guess a Galls man or someone sympathetic to them

Curious as to why it would work better for us?

The working model I heard before this latest proposal was reducing div 1 down to ten teams which would mean in the current standings galls drop to div 2

Are these proposals going to improve the standard of Division 1? answer is no. Are these proposals going to lower the standard in Divison 1? the answer is yes.
I look forward to hearing how the All Saints Chairman (member of working group) justifies his club being parachuted into Division 1 and whether he can keep a straight face while doing it.

Who else was in the working group that put this forward? I'd guess a Galls man or someone sympathetic to them

The 1A and 1B arguments make no sense.

1A is division 1 by another name, but the proposal that I saw had the lowest 4 teams in 1A and 1B form 1B the following year.

So if 1A are the teams ranked 1-8 in the county and 1B are teams ranked 9-16, in 2025 that means we'll have 1-4 and 9-12 in the same division and 5-8 and 12-16 in the same.



It's ludicrous.

And div 2 is 10 teams but still has a split? It's completely pointless.

And sure we'll arbitrarily move either Dunloy up to senior and Ballymena down because might as well commit to the poorly thought out idea

Agree with those points entirely!
The proposal you talk of was an option , not the best one at all.
A few clubs took the hump that they'd be in 1B ....so we have a proposed 16 team Div 1. Div 2 spilt  + championship games equals a maximum of 20 game season for football only clubs

I skimmed the newer one that was doing the rounds but looked a whole lot the same so didn't read fully. But surely throwing in H&A for div 2 is fair enough. It'd only equate to 4 more matches and actually means we get few of a bunch of dead rubbers.

I'd be embarrassed to be one of the people putting this forward to save face for their club. Take your medicine and if you're good enough you're good enough.

The 1A and 1B arguments make no sense.

1A is division 1 by another name, but the proposal that I saw had the lowest 4 teams in 1A and 1B form 1B the following year.

So if 1A are the teams ranked 1-8 in the county and 1B are teams ranked 9-16, in 2025 that means we'll have 1-4 and 9-12 in the same division and 5-8 and 12-16 in the same.

It's ludicrous.

And div 2 is 10 teams but still has a split? It's completely pointless.

And sure we'll arbitrarily move either Dunloy up to senior and Ballymena down because might as well commit to the poorly thought out idea

Any word on which way they are restructuring the leagues, if they are or not??

That'd make too much sense for teams to be able to plan pre-season.

It'd be 8 weeks out to the start of the leagues if it was the same dates as last year

Saffron Gael coverage is top class across all leagues - fair play
No big surprises for me in Div 1 except Aghagallon's performance and maybe Creggan going to concentrate on Championships
Rossa shoe in for Div 2 and NPol finding their feet in Div 3 and will climb up the league in the weeks and months ahead

To be fair to them, they did play the johnnies, Galls, Creggan and Cargin in four out of the first five matches. No mean feat to get results out of them.

Good win for NE today and great start by the Gorts the stand out results today

Gorts playing near the full match a man down. Surely times up on the escape act for Teresa's this year?

Gaelfest is one plan, leadership has changed very recently so that needs time to flourish. The schools have had varied attempts to improve on their worth but unfortunately not enough kids are interested, so if you've not got them at primary school level then they are completely lost come secondary school!

A Belfast league? The reason we go all county is to give kids more games, the reason these games aren't played can be as you've mentioned is schools, exams and so on, one other reason is having games on a Friday night, where travel to Ballycastle is difficult, the sensible fixture should be Belfast games should be during the week while weekend games should be against teams from 30 plus miles away..

how can soccer be played ever weekend on grass pitches from August through to May?! Should we look at changing the dates ?

Rugby at juvenile level is only played at school level competition wise in the north, they don't play for clubs as such until they play for senior clubs or old schools clubs.

At a leadership level putting measures in place quickly to change current systems is harder than we think I'd imagine. If someone put your proposal in place and it didn't work then where do we go?

The beauty of being a member of a club is you can put these proposals to your club committee and they can bring that to the county.

There is something worth looking at in the idea of a Belfast league, maybe as a pre regular league competition or at the end of the playing calendar. Even a south Belfast league would be worthwhile as a mini competition

I swear people forget so easily how things were set up before. Underage wasn't all county 11 years ago and it had its drawbacks. The main one? There isn't  enough teams to have proper divisions. One week we'd play a fantastic Creggan team and beat by 5/6 the next week we held St Comgalls to two points over 60 minutes. Swings and roundabouts.

This is like people saying we need to look at adding more divisions, 11/12 years ago we had divisions and it fostered a more competitive scene as reserve teams of varying quality were spread throughout these divisions. A galls/cargin second team was regularly finishing quite competitively in div 2/3.  It also meant that reserve matches didn't swing wildly from one week to the next as they do now as it was in essence an actual seperate team.

We don't have the depth of other counties in terms of numbers of teams and I still a home/away fixture set is a more accurate setup than the current implementation of the top/bottom.

Here's last year's Div 1 top 6 in order
1)Creggan
2)NG
3)Cargin
4)NEoin
5)LD
6)PG1

anyone think NEanna will break into this and at who's expense?

Don't see it. Perhaps PG1 if their trajectory has been stunted somehow.  NEanna were very fit last year and came out of the blocks quickly, expect the same in the league this year but suspect they are way off a senior championship tilt.

ps love Bannside's Antrim optimism, got to give it to the guy, we're bottom of Div 4 and he can still see the bright side. Supporter of the year already!

It's an odd one though isn't it. The bare minimum between two of the better teams and then a bit in it against Wexford who got turned over themselves by London (not as a disservice to London).

Think it's highlighting the inexperience of the squad at the minute. If we were looking at players on the team who would have 20/30+ senior matches under their belt etc?