Intercounty apathy a worrying trend

[J70]

Interesting discussion.

[lenny]

With regards to the suggestion of a Senior, Intermediate and Junior Championship as seen in club football, could we look at what this might entail?

I presume we'd have roughly the same number in each so say eleven counties in each.

Based on current league standings we would end up with Cavan competing with Dublin, Mayo and Kerry. How would this benefit Cavan?

Intermediate wouldn't be too bad but in Junior we'd have New York and London competing with Westmeath and Louth. How would this benefit them?

Again, who is that we're trying to benefit from such a re-jig?

I would favour 8 senior, 12 intermediate and 12 junior. There are realistically only 7 or 8 teams at the top level. That would leave a good championship at each grade with every team capable of winning at their level.

[Syferus]

Some awful gloomy predictions altogether
Why do we need Provincial Councils any more?
Surely a small Committee of 1 Rep from each County could with the usual volunteers/ stewards run the Championships.
As for giving out grants etc I suspect that could easily be done from Croke Park.
The whole Provincial structure comes from the horse and cart and communication by letter era.

That'd make too much sense, so it won't be done.

Just like fixing demands on players, the incredible monetary advantages of some counties and how spread out the schedule is won't be done because all people want to talk about is catch-all solutions that only change the order or type of games being played.

Not seeing the forest for the trees springs to mind.

[Rossfan]

I presume we'd have roughly the same number in each so say eleven counties

I would favour 8 senior, 12 intermediate and 12 junior. There are realistically only 7 or 8 teams at the top level. That would leave a good championship at each grade with every team capable of winning at their level.

12, 12 and 8.

[Il Bomber Destro]

Condensing the season and not having crossover between club and county as much as possible would alleviate this.

For the majority of players there is little end, it's start with county in Dec/January and then finish with club sometime around Oct on average I would imagine with serious dedication and no free time in it. It's an exhausting cycle I'm sure.

The tiered Championship talk is all very good but as mentioned, there's no appetite for it.

[Jinxy]

What is there appetite for?

[lenny]

Condensing the season and not having crossover between club and county as much as possible would alleviate this.

For the majority of players there is little end, it's start with county in Dec/January and then finish with club sometime around Oct on average I would imagine with serious dedication and no free time in it. It's an exhausting cycle I'm sure.

The tiered Championship talk is all very good but as mentioned, there's no appetite for it.

There's no appetite for it because noone has talked publicly about a 3 tier system like at club level. It's amazing it hasn't been discussed publicly. When people talk about it they immediately think of the tommy murphy cup which wasn't a championship but a cup for the very weakest  teams who were beaten in the first round of the "real" championship.

[Il Bomber Destro]

Condensing the season and not having crossover between club and county as much as possible would alleviate this.

For the majority of players there is little end, it's start with county in Dec/January and then finish with club sometime around Oct on average I would imagine with serious dedication and no free time in it. It's an exhausting cycle I'm sure.

The tiered Championship talk is all very good but as mentioned, there's no appetite for it.

There's no appetite for it because noone has talked publicly about a 3 tier system like at club level. It's amazing it hasn't been discussed publicly. When people talk about it they immediately think of the tommy murphy cup which wasn't a championship but a cup for the very weakest  teams who were beaten in the first round of the "real" championship.

There has been plenty of talk about it.

The players in the smaller counties have been quite vocal about not wanting to partake in it.

[Rossfan]

What is there appetite for?

Not much public appetite for the  "one for everyone in the audience" Qualifiers last year.. Only for Mayowestros..... Rounds 1,2 and 3  attracted circa 44,000 for 19 games if you exclude the 2 Rhubarb games. Their 2 attracted 26,568.

[Kuwabatake Sanjuro]

I'm friends with an ex Westmeath hurler, he reckons the Christy Ring cup held them back a long way as it was far more difficult to get all their players willing to commit to a mickey mouse competition. He hated it with a passion. Getting out of it has brought them on a fair bit.

[Bord na Mona man]

If you're going to have tiers, then you should still reserve a wild card the top tier quarter final for whoever has come through the lower tiers. Otherwise you aren't going to incentivise the counties banished out of All Ireland contention.

Some good points have been made in the debate. As has been alluded to, we need to further question the agenda of those who want to push the lower ranked counties out the door. A lot of journos and pundits want more of the big occasion games of the All Ireland series and to spend less time holding their noses watching the lower division counties.

Unfortunately I feel this is another sympton of the condescending culture that has become commonplace in GAA analysis. The efforts of the lower counties get ridiculed far too easily and often. Some of the 'apathy' comes from the sneering and dismissive way the games are analysed these days. If you keep telling the punters what they are witnessing is dirge, you'll plant the seeds and they'll start to vote with their feet.

Counties can and do make the jump under the current structure. It wasn't many years ago when Kevin McStay did a Sunday Game montage of Tipperary mistakes when they shipped a beating off Cork. He concluded that they have no business in the championship and should be shipped out to a B championship. In his defence, he isn't in the same league and Brolly, Spillane and O'Rourke for toxic analysis.

[Jinxy]

I'm friends with an ex Westmeath hurler, he reckons the Christy Ring cup held them back a long way as it was far more difficult to get all their players willing to commit to a mickey mouse competition. He hated it with a passion. Getting out of it has brought them on a fair bit.

In the early years the Christy Ring cup was all over the place though.
Some years there was no promotion or relegation so it didn't make any difference how you did.
I could see how that would lead to apathy alright.

[Lone Shark]

If the provincials need to be linked to the All Ireland to retain interest then it's logical to suggest they have no intrinsic value themselves. Play them as stand alone competitions if you like but I can't see how anyone can know the problems we have (club and county level) and still argue for the provincials as a core element of the championship.

Yes and no on this. The provincials need to be linked to the All Ireland in order for Dublin, Kerry and Mayo to retain an interest, and to a lesser extent Cork, Tyrone, Donegal etc. The division three and division four counties don't need the provincials to be linked to the All Ireland at all, but they do need to know that a provincial title still has value, and that it won't be diminished as something that has fractionally more prestige than the O'Byrne Cup. Galway were delighted to win their provincial title this year, but they were delighted because their win over Mayo was a genuine one, not a preseason style game.

I promise you, counties like Offaly still dream of Leinster titles, and that motivates them to go through all the hardship. Of course there is a massive gap to be bridged with Dublin (F) and Kilkenny (H) at the top of the tree, but they want to take that chance. Would they still be as motivated if they knew that Dublin and Kilkenny weren't going to be focused on winning it? Not at all.

I presume we'd have roughly the same number in each so say eleven counties

I would favour 8 senior, 12 intermediate and 12 junior. There are realistically only 7 or 8 teams at the top level. That would leave a good championship at each grade with every team capable of winning at their level.

12, 12 and 8.

In the space of just 13 characters, Rossfan has summed up the attitude to the lower tier competitions perfectly. Everyone thinks that they're a great idea FOR OTHER COUNTIES - but not for them. Right now, Roscommon are a division one county on 2016 league form, and a D2/D3 county on championship form. Overall, if it was 12 teams, they'd be in the top tier certainly, but at 8, it'd be touch and go - so a Roscommon fan thinks it should be 12.

I'm betting that if you asked someone from Tyrone or Donegal, they'd say eight in the top tier. Somebody from Meath or Kildare would say 16. Everyone would draw the line just underneath themselves.

This brings me back to my previous point - when players and officials from counties that would actually have to play in these competitions call for them, I'll respect them - but I haven't seen one instance of that yet, while the body of players as a whole (through the GPA) made it clear that they didn't want such a structure at all. Yet everyone says that it's these counties that we're doing this for.

Colour me sceptical.

[Rossfan]

Please don't presume to read my mind thanks very much. Maybe some of us are thinking what's best for Gaelic football.Just make your points for/against things without impugning the motives of posters here. How dare you!!
By the time Senior/Inter/Junior comes around we will be lucky (Demographics etc) to make the Junior grade.
In 25 years time there will be 1.5m people in Dublin and probably 800k in Kildare/Meath/Wicklow.
Are present Administrative structures and Competition structures suitable for this forthcoming lopsided population?

[Lar Naparka]

Some awful gloomy predictions altogether
Why do we need Provincial Councils any more?
Surely a small Committee of 1 Rep from each County could with the usual volunteers/ stewards run the Championships.
As for giving out grants etc I suspect that could easily be done from Croke Park.
The whole Provincial structure comes from the horse and cart and communication by letter era.

That'd make too much sense, so it won't be done.

Just like fixing demands on players, the incredible monetary advantages of some counties and how spread out the schedule is won't be done because all people want to talk about is catch-all solutions that only change the order or type of games being played.

Not seeing the forest for the trees springs to mind.

Good man Syf, yer back to yer best again! 
Fielding intercounty teams is an incredibly expensive process any more- for those with any realistic hopes of winning an All Ireland .
Delegates at the Mayo convention meeting before Christmas were told that it cost €1.6m to field representative teams in 2016.
I know this year wasn't a typical one with the senior going all the way to a final replay and the u21s winning their final. Ladies teams, minors etc. have also to be taken into account but €1.6m but for a county with a falling population and severely affected by rural depopulation, is a huge outlay that can't be sustained year after year and the major portion was spent on the senior side.
But I think it's fair to assume that the major part of that expense was incurred by the senior side.
Dublin is the trendsetter here, with a small hard core of counties struggling to stay in touch. The application of Professionalism and Science to training and playing methods means that counties without deep pockets can forget about winning a provincial, let alone an All Ireland.
Dublin are professional in every way except the players are amateurs and the same can be said to a limited extent for Mayo, Kerry, Tyrone and a few others. It came out somewhere in discussions on this board last year that Mayo had a total of 34 backroom staff and I can only assume that Dublin have more and Kerry, Tyrone etc. will have much the same.
With those sort of overheads, most counties, with Dublin being the sole exception, can expect to remain competitive for more than a few years at a time as the demands on players is increasing all the time,
They are professionals in every way -except they don't get paid for their labours.
Moreover, it seems that every county, with realistic hopes of winning an All Ireland or not, have ramped up their training and general preparation regimes.
I think it's perfectly understandable that players in so-called 'weaker' counties are required to devote so much time and energy to an intercounty programme that will see many of them playing only two championship matches every year.
I don't see any easy solution; in fact, I see none at all.
Vested interests will see to it that the present format remains in place. Kerry and Cork, Galway vs. Mayo and what used to be one hell of a cracker was the annual derby clash between Dublin and Meath are fixtures ingrained in the counties' pysches and won't be easily altered.
I can't see Dublin split in any way either even though the need to do so is obvious. For every county that wants radical change to the present format, there is at least one other who wants nothing of the sort.
I can't see the Leinster championship being neither entertaining nor profitable this year as it's at least 95% certain that Dublin will amble through the province once more and I can't imagine that there will be serious opposition to Kerry in Munster.
These were the traditional strongholds of the GAA down the years and there is any air of inevitability about the result in both. Probably, there is no reason to suppose that Mayo won't be as bad as they were against Galway last year and that's leave only Ulster as the one province where there will be a competitive championship this year.
It's time to be afraid; very afraid.