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Cleverly able to paint itself as a premier competition my ass.

The BBC is furiously flagellating itself about how important a competition it is in order to show how great OWC is, which  shows where their priorities lie.

Anybody that believes that this tournament warrants the coverage given to it by the BBC  needs their head examined. 

If it had to stand on its own two feet it wouldn't exist.

Having been involved in youth football for the best part of a decade I have to say that Northern Ireland has not one but two top tier youth competitions annually. I helped out with fundraising for the Co Antrim squad 4 or 5 years ago and was very impressed with the level and quality of the organisation. The milk cup is in youth football terms a fantastic competition.

Thats great.

But it wouldn't exist without a huge swathe of public money being given to it directly and 'in kind'.

And the media coverage it is afforded stands in stark contrast to the likes of a feile which doesn't merit a mention in the mainstream media outlets, certainly in the North.

There's a lot of people on here talking about begrudgery and not giving credit where its due or being derogatory to other sports.

Well my issue isn't with these sports per se or the people who play or watch them. However without the public provision of playing fields there wouldnt be a single soccer league able to run in this country let alone an 'international competition', as the vast majority of soccer clubs don't have a pot to piss in let alone have their own playing fields. If the public purse wasnt providing these you can be sure there would be next to zero soccer being played here.

The level of press coverage given to this Mickey Mouse competition is absurd. The contrast with how GAA is publicly funded and covered in the media is stark.

Though it is obviously working when you get people on here lauding the level of soccer talent coming to 'these shores'. Hahahaha Watson eat your heart out. You could count on your fingers the number of people who made it to the top level in soccer who played in the Milk Cup. God knows they are listed ad nauseum every year.

And don't get me started on Road Racing, a sport that needs to close the public roads to exist. And the hundreds of thousands, sorry, quarter of a million spectators, don't make me laugh, there wouldnt be 10,000 people paying to watch this nonsense.

I have no issue with anyone participating or attending , it's the orgasmic media love-in that pisses me off.

Just another excuse to show how great 'Our Wee Country' is. As with other non-events, like the NW200, bigged up to show how great Norn Iron is, it couldn't run if there wasn't a shitload of public money thrown at it.

A load of wains running round like sheep  but the BBC treats it like a mini woirld cup. There'd be more peeps at Owenbeg for an Intermediate match than would attend the whole thing.

This is a disgrace. They should just have one competition and let everyone enter it on an equal basis. To the victor/ess the spoils.

PS I read the article in the IN and she pointed out that it took her 35 strokes to complete the course whilst the winner completed it in 25.

And her using a size 4 sliothar as well, absolute disgrace, back to making the tea and sandwiches for the lads, isn't that their place Keyser?

I never mentioned tea and sandwiches.

This is a disgrace. They should just have one competition and let everyone enter it on an equal basis. To the victor/ess the spoils.

PS I read the article in the IN and she pointed out that it took her 35 strokes to complete the course whilst the winner completed it in 25.

Here, there will probably be a T-shirt cannon at half-time!

The poor oul ref was third man into the row....and fell on his hole lmao

Only saw the game on the box.

There's no doubt the referee gave Galway a number of incredibly soft frees which brought them into the game and put them into a handy lead at half-time, for some of them I couldn't even see any significant contact let alone a foul.  The black card was a complete joke.

One of the commentators yesterday likened football to basketball, if clowns like this continue to referee games we will end up with a complete non-contact sport, tag gaelic. He was also very biased towards Galway and after that performance should be taken off the referees panel. Mills Lane would have done a better job. I'm putting a tenner on him to get the AI final 

Derry.......While i don't want to be critical of the players and management, we reverted to slow lateral nonsense across the pitch, and before anybody blames the conditions we have been doing the same stuff for 10+ years, some of the brainless stuff we done yesterday.....getting THREE frees moved forward.... OMGFG. We still seem to be miles behind in our setup and discipline than the top teams, Galway's transition to attack yesterday was much smoother than ours, everything we did was sooooo laboured.

Finally congratulations to Galway and good luck in the next round. Saturday was very poor conditions for good football but they have some fine players and a good structure. They 've given a very good Mayo side a tight game and saw off two decent Ulster sides. Why anyone would write them off against Donegal seems unfathomable, I think they have a great chance of beating them.

Well I think Easytiger has got some valid points here. The fatalistic acceptance of defeat in Leinster is embarassing tbh. Some of these counties need to grow a set instead of jumping onto the tumbrille with head bowed. This is a great Dublin side playing great football, but no team is unbeatable. It appears that the rest of the province has given up the ghost though. Sad to see when one remembers the epic battles of the nineties.

Why do people continually refer to the league division counties are in as if it has some relevance to their championship pedigree or potential? Lazy, stupid approach.

I'd imagine because if you are going to enforce championship apartheid, the league standings are as logical a place to start as any other. It would also make the league even more relevant I suppose.

Lenny, aren't those days the reason we all play and support the games? Whether Antrim would knock as much joy out of winning a Junior Championship I don't know, but experience of the Tommy Murphy Cup would suggest not. Also the way the Christy Ring Nicky Rackard and Lory Meagher Cups are treated wouldn't inspire me as a player.

I want Offaly to play against Dublin, Kildare and Meath. I don't know that Offaly would be inspired by winning a Junior championship game against Waterford. At least when they beat Waterford this time around they've set themselves a task against Kildare.

It seems to me that the problem is : We want Dublin to only play the top 5 teams in the country, and we don't want the bottom 5 to play at all.

You may be right. It's only a suggestion. Because the senior, intermediate and junior systems are well embedded at club level everyone is happy with them and junior club sides aren't arguing that they should be playing the big senior clubs, they are realistic enough to know thatnthey would get stuffed. The tommy murphy cup was set up for teams knocked out of the championship, ie a fall back. the way i see it if teams just entered at their own level they could set themselves the realistic target of winning a championship. they would then automatically move up to the next tier as happens at club level.  From a Derry point of view I can see no realistic chance of us winning an all ireland at the moment. We are probably at the lower end of senior and may be more of an intermediate team. If we were in an intermediate championship we would have a realistic chance to win and i think that would be good for the development of the young players. As it is if we get a good run in the qualifiers we could reach the last 12 or maybe even qfs. It's only delaying the inevitable though because we aren't good enough to beat Dublin or Kerry and a couple of the other top teams.

It looks like you are advocating a top four competition! Why not just go the whole hog and have a top one!!! All this nasty competitive stuff and teams beatin other teams and unfair stuff like that....it's just gotta stop.

Stephen Hawkings writes:
"Provided the universe has evolved in a regular way, we might expect that the reasoning abilities that natural selection has given us would be valid....and so would not lead us to the wrong conclusions"

Purely on materialistic grounds, this argument and yours J70 is entirely circular. In a naturalist universe in which nothing exists but matter, our minds would reducible to brain chemistry. Our thoughts, ideas even our reasoning would be reducible to deterministic physical processes. So when Hawkings (surely regarded as one of the greats of naturalism) appeals to the theory of evolution, random mutation and natural selection to explain our ability to think, reason and draw accurate conclusions, he appeals o a theory that is itself the result of physical processes How can you or Hawkings or any naturalist know that your ideas are true??

If our ideas are just the biological product of deterministic material laws and natural processes, biochemical excretions and whatnot, why does anything you have to say about anything have any meaning? Or any truth?

If you are really a firm naturalist surely you agree?

Hah didnt get a proper chance to read that till now Iceman. Basically what you are trrying to say is "nobody knows nawhin, they only think they know something"

On a side note I used to go to a quiz in Belfast in which there would be rather "colourful" team names one week there was a clinker:

"If Stephen Hawking is so f**king smart, why doesn't he get up and walk"

Is that a clinker as in a peurile/offensive/unfunny/disturbing kind of clinker?

[Well you are making my point here, the introduction of a backdoor has already made the elites untouchable. And you want to go further down this road??]

I'm quite happy to defend the current system, but I don't think we'd get very far.

So would you argue it's the best system we can have?

The Gaa is unique and special because of it's structure of club based on parishes, counties and provinces. You, and others on here, seem to think that it is a complete waste of time and that the entire programme is a 'disaster'.

But under this system clubs are getting screwed, most counties have little worthwhile to compete for and we're at the provincial final stage in most provinces with hardly a game of note or surprise result in any of them (including the hurling). Monaghan and Donegal (most likely) again in Ulster, Mayo in a final going for 5 in a row facing a division 3 team in the final, Dublin well set for, is it 5 in a row too? Cork and Kerry again in Munster while Tipp and Kilkenny look head and shoulders above everyone else in hurling....again. Is that a system that's working?

Well you are making my point here, the introduction of a backdoor has already made the elites untouchable. And you want to go further down this road??

Well I think it works pretty well, albeit with plenty of problems, but I don't want changes that won't guarantee that the entire ethos of our games won't be lost.

I actually can guarantee that, because a better system will help club and county play more games in a properly structured manner. The only thing I'd rid of is the provincials and even then if a system is proposed that can retain them and achieve more meaningful games between teams of similar ability in a structured manner then fine.

So you want to introduce a system that will allow both club and county more meaningful games. How? Are you gonna extend a year by a few more weeks??

An unintended consequence of the back door has been to dilute the blood and thunder nature of championship matches [in my view] and it has created elites within the game already, to the extent that only one of the three provincial championships is in any way competitive.

I don't think that was an unintended consequence and once you removed the do or die element there was always going to be a dilution of intensity. There were always elites in the game, how many provincial titles have Kerry, Cork, Mayo, Galway, Dublin, Meath, Cavan and Tyrone compared to Clare, Waterford, Leitrim, Sligo, Carlow, Wicklow, Fermanagh and Antrim? None of the provincial championships are competitive.

Intended?? Piffle, you are talking nonsense.

Some of these counties might not have many titles but I guarantee that any they do have are well remembered. And many of these counties would have genuinely believed up until lately that with a big push they could still achieve one. But you would happily take that away from them?

[If you consider it satire then, yes, I don't have the same acquaintance to satire as you do.]

Here why don't we have a 32 tier championship so that all the lads that have been bustin their hole all winter get a medal.

Somebody needs to stand up for these weaker counties. Why should the good teams win all the f****** games, the whole system is so completely biased against the bad teams. Every f***** year.....same oul s**** ....the best team wins the all-ireland and all the good treams are getting to semi-finals and shite like that. It's just not fair!!!

So, putting your bizarrely aggressive post to one side - seriously, what do you suggest?

You and satire obviously do not have any more than a passing acquaintance.   

And anyway what's the point of me posting a reply. Sure you will probably just put it one side if you don't like it.

And I did make a suggestion, give everybody a championship of their own. Seems like a logical conclusion to the rationale that we can't have teams taking a bit of a beating from better teams.

Satire? I was fully aware of the point you are making and the manner in which you were making it (Bizarrely using swear words to make the point) . If you consider it satire then, yes, I don't have the same acquaintance to satire as you do.

In a grown up debate though, I'd be interested to hear other peoples suggestions. It's interesting that you won't post your own preferred choice of system as it will get put to one side, even though you are more than happy to ridicule any other suggestions made. (I will give you the benefit of the doubt that your 32 tier championship is indeed satire). If you don't have a preferred system then fair enough.

Well i don't know what your definition of satire is but sure we could just look itup in the dictionary.

Satire definition: the use of irony, sarcasm, ridicule, or the like, in exposing, denouncing, or deriding vice, folly, etc.

I like my satire to be a bit more subtle. But each to their own!

Mine was so subtle you didnt even recognise it as satire!