SIDELINE CUT:This could be a summer of poor All-Ireland series crowds and it is clear the energy which was a huge part of a hugely successful decade for the GAA has evaporated, writes KEITH DUGGAN

THE ALL-IRELAND championship is in danger of becoming the great bore of summer. Some element of magic has left the great national sporting road show. It is too slow, too predictable and goes on for too long. These are old complaints and the ladies and gentleman of Cumann Luthchleas Gael have heard them all before. They have a method for dealing with such quibbles, politely registering them in the vast, dusty Book of Complaints they store up there in Jones’s Road before explaining that in the association, this is how they do things.

In less than a fortnight, the World Cup will crank up in South Africa, giving rise to a new wave of bitterness at Ireland’s absence and the novelty of a tightly-run, intensely scheduled international sporting tournament.

Fifa’s style is to go with an all-out assault, giving its global audience a sugar rush of the beautiful game. Judged against such an intensely colourful and exuberant and melodramatic tournament, the GAA summer schedule can look a little parched and staid in its ways.

I recall being in a pub in Oxford the day the Republic of Ireland played Spain in the play-off match in the 2002 World Cup. This was a solid blue-collar Irish pub, the day was scorching and the atmosphere was full-blown boozed-patriot.

Minutes after Ireland had been eliminated in heartbreaking fashion, the television screen went blank for a few seconds and then all eyes were drawn to Derry against Donegal in the Ulster semi-final in Clones. The old stadium was much emptier than normal because so many people had stayed home to watch the football and it was one of those rainy, overcast days.

But at that moment, the GAA match seemed to exist in a universe of its own, entirely unconnected to the national – let alone international – emotion and interest.

Certain matches in this year’s championship will be forced into a similar time warp once the World Cup gains momentum – although Ireland’s absence means the country won’t go as daft as on previous occasions.

Of course, the GAA is well used to the World Cup phenomenon. They survived predictions that Ireland’s success in 1990 would all but wipe their association out and they have learned to cope with the four-year World Cup cycle, reasoning the thing will be over my mid-July, by which time the All-Ireland championship will have just begun to heat up.

It is a fair assumption to make. But it doesn’t disguise the fact the All-Ireland just seems like a jaded concept this year. During the decade when Ireland went absolutely bananas (remember those radio adverts that went “Worried about where to take the kids skiing this year?” Well, no one is worrying about that now), it might have been expected the GAA would have been dismissed as a relic of the staid, conservative skin that was so eagerly shed.

For a myriad reasons, the GAA – and in particular the All-Ireland championship – thrived during the economic bubble.

Televising the championship and devising the qualifier system – a huge novelty for the first few years – were key in making this happen. Television magazine shows like Breaking Ball radically improved the stereotypical image of the GAA.

Some of the games were brilliant.

Teams were getting younger, fitter, growing in confidence and counties who had traditionally been whipping boys of summer brought new-found confidence to the table.

The belief that hard work and self-belief could overcome the trappings of tradition was commonplace. And so Westmeath won a Leinster title and Fermanagh came close to playing in an All-Ireland final. Pop tunes were blasted out through old loudspeakers that had for decades been reserved for the “fógra” for a missing child or some car parked with lunatic abandon.

The boys on the Sunday Game ditched the ties of yesteryear for a younger, funkier wardrobe that suggested smart, but casual. Team warm-ups and the post-match comments of players (cautious, guarded, boring as hell) reflected the view that players had become as professional as Didier Drogba in every respect besides bank balance. For a while, the championship successfully sold the illusion anything was possible for teams who tried hard enough. And the public willingly bought it.

But it was an illusion. The qualifier novelty is wearing thin. Yes, it means Kerry must go and play in Longford, as they did last year. And it was exciting. But Kerry still won. The old order still prevails, in football and in hurling. Weaker counties are discovering nothing has fundamentally changed: they go out sooner or later.

Travelling to see your county play is a bigger financial concern this summer than it has been for 20 years. Already, that has been reflected in attendance figures. A growing number of prominent GAA people are calling for the All-Ireland to be reinvented in a radical way; to go for broke and to ditch the plodding, honourable tradition of the provincial system. The reluctance to do this is understandable.

Patience is the greatest virtue in the GAA. History has shown that sooner or later, something happens – like the four-game saga between Meath and Dublin in 1991, like Kilkenny v Galway in 2005 (But how many were at that game? 39, 975 ). They rely on the championship to make its own narrative. And maybe it will do this summer.

But right now, for anyone attending the matches, it is clear the energy which was a huge part of a staggeringly successful decade for the GAA has evaporated. The sheer vastness of Croke Park is both an attraction and a drawback. When the stadium is filled, there is nowhere like it. But too often in the championship, there are tens of thousands of empty seats and this could be a summer of poor crowds.

The GAA won’t panic and they can easily ride out a less than vintage championship.

The danger for the GAA is they might have lost something that they never fully grasped in the first place.

You can’t bottle magic.