Remember when it was all a bit of mystery how the football league opened up with a bang – and occasionally full houses in Croke Park – and yet by the end of the competition, ennui had set in and apart from a couple of Dublin-Kerry belters, not many were bothered to show up when the destination of the title was decided.
Yet the weekend coming up has evolved into one of the great set pieces of the GAA year. The final round of matches to decide the top two and those condemned to relegation have been exciting and because each fixture within the four divisions started at the same time, held their tension until the final whistle.
That phenomenon was intensified when the nexus between bottom of Division Two and top of Division Three became a battlefield for Tier 1 championship survival, as it will be again this weekend.
One problem which has emerged is that the theoretically clean divide between the top 16 in the league and the rest has become complicated by the number of exemptions available.
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There is a chance going into the league finale that later this year both the Munster and Leinster championships will produce provincial finalists from Divisions Three or Four, and were Tailteann holders Down to get relegated, that would make it three teams taking space in the Sam Maguire from Division Two counties.
There is however malaise elsewhere. Recent talk around Division One has been what counties ‘want’ to win it or at least to reach the final (on the basis that once you’re there, you might as well win) with reasoning all too plain to see. Every year within the split-season calendar, the championship is getting rear-ended by the league.
This year’s damage is the Donegal-Derry Ulster championship fixture on April 6th.
On one level it’s only to be expected. Teams will struggle to go from contesting a national final one week to opening their championship the next. Mayo found that out the hard way two years ago and it’s not as if the provincial and All-Ireland postmortems are likely to conclude that “in fairness, they won the league”.
For a good deal of the past 25 years, league and championship prominence have gone hand-in-hand. It’s a convergence that Pádraic Joyce has mentioned in the past few years in which he has appeared bothered by the fact that doing well in the league is something that All-Ireland contenders tend to do.
After they beat Kerry two years ago to reach the final, which they lost to Mayo, he had this to say: “It’s a national title. People say they don’t want to win the league but I lost three finals as a player and some of the lads lost one to Dublin a few years ago. It’s going back to 1981 when we last won and that’s a long, long time. I said it before that the teams who are successful in championship pick up league titles along the way whether it’s every second or third year”.
Joyce has been making the same point this season, adding poignantly that his uncle played on the last Galway side to win the league before Billy Joyce died last week.
He acknowledged though that the tight connection between the two was unravelling a bit in recent times and he is right.
The two most recent Division One finals produced neither an All-Ireland finalist nor semi-finalist – the only time this has happened in the past 10 seasons of conventional leagues (not including the Covid-affected seasons of 2020 and ‘21).
Croke Park’s Central Competitions Control Committee (CCCC) attempted two years ago to scrap league finals and create an additional week for teams by awarding the divisional titles to the counties topping their table. It wasn’t accepted.
You could argue that the frenzy ignited by the last weekend of the football league is overstated, certainly viewed by outcomes. You have to go back 11 seasons to find the last time there was a material change at the top of Division One after the final day’s results.
In only three of those years have the bottom two been disturbed by the final weekend’s results.
That’s strictly post hoc, though. There have been captivating, roller-coaster trips through the last day as scores tilted the balance one way and then the other, affecting advancement and demotion.
It is high time to have a further look at the CCCC proposal. By simply awarding the title to the team that finishes first in Division One, all agonising over whether to qualify for the final would be rendered redundant.
There would be an argument that the lower divisional finals would lose out on the big day in Croke Park but promotion is the main focus of such counties; the final is more of an afterthought.
We’re at the end of a terrific league that platformed the new FRC rules and attracted great interest. The competition every year has the great virtue that it is built on four largely competitive units, which provide well-contested fixtures.
It’s a shame that when the season comes to an end there is more smoke, mirrors and hand-wringing over who really wants to win it than who have been the best team.
Crowds at the finals have been underwhelming in recent years, so there’s hardly a fortune being sacrificed and even bearing that loss is surely better than sacrificing the dignity of the competition?
email: sean.moran@irishtimes.com
