SEÁN MORAN On Gaelic Games:When it all falls apart in a smaller county, the integrity of the entire competitive structure suffers and it creates a worrying precedent.

IT USED to be shorthand for football’s ground zero. A county with a redemptive tale frequently benchmarked its progress by claiming, whether accurately or not, that at the start of it all they were ranked the 31st county in football: in other words, below them only Kilkenny.

This JAK (Just Above Kilkenny) narrative has been complicated by the presence of London in the NFL – providing Kilkenny with a partner in destitution – but it retains it’s metaphorical power.

So it came to pass that Fermanagh last weekend made the trip to fortress Jenkinstown to take on Kilkenny’s footballers, a resilient breed who had chalked up another nihilistic distinction by failing to score at all against Leitrim (themselves a former JAK) in the counties’ league encounter.

By half-time the status of JAKs had come vividly to life, as the Ulster visitors led by only four points. Eventually they pulled away for the sort of victory that teams routinely rack up against Kilkenny.

Nonetheless in the future when Fermanagh have recovered from the current turmoil and put together the sort of respectable run that they were capable of in the past decade they will have irrefutable evidence that by the spring of 2011 they had indeed earned on merit the JAK distinction.

Aside from the difficulties specifically for the county in the short term, the situation in Fermanagh is of sharp relevance for the GAA in the uncertain times ahead.

The entire competitive and administrative system of the GAA is based on a trade-off between exploiting the sense of local identity and more logistical imperatives.

Despite the inequalities of scale roughly three-quarters of the counties have managed to win a senior All-Ireland at some stage in their history. Only two counties, Fermanagh and Wicklow, have yet to win a senior provincial title.

Behind that façade of relative equality lies the prosaic truth that of the counties who have taken home the 40 All-Irelands of the last 20 years, just two – Kilkenny and Offaly, admittedly accounting for more than a quarter of the titles – have populations smaller than 110,000.

(This can be qualified in the case of the cross-border Ulster counties where the traditional community divisions greatly reduce the headline population count but the same factor has conversely provided a more passionate engagement with the GAA amongst nationalists than is often the case in the South.) The GAA can sustain this massive natural imbalance for a couple of reasons.

One, as mentioned above, most counties get something every now and then. Two, tradition can sometimes offset the impact of grossly disproportionate demographics.

Dublin, for example, with its relentlessly increasing share of the national population (as of the 2006 census, 1,200,000 out of 4,200,000) goes into the ring on Saturday at Croke Park with Kilkenny (population 88,000) in the hurling league but, even with an encouraging season to date, the home team is regarded as plucky outsiders – as opposed to football, the hurling motif is NAK, Nobody Above Kilkenny.

Another mitigating factor is the existence of provincial championships, which retain their appeal most strongly in generally unsuccessful counties.

For instance Fermanagh, although whipped into a frenzy in August 2004 by the team’s first participation in an All-Ireland semi-final (and replay), still pined after the provincial title they had yet to win even though the currency of those championships has fallen in the 10 years of the qualifiers.

The aspiration to win provincial championships as well as the possibility of a run in the All-Ireland qualifiers has created positive interim targets for football counties who under the old knockout system would have been kept in a headlock.

That in turn has focused more attention on the investment in preparing county teams. A county like Fermanagh has been to the mountain top and seen the Promised Land even if it hasn’t actually arrived. Its players are unlikely to be happy to revert to the old days of playing for years without winning a match in the championship.

They will also carefully evaluate their prospects in any given season to see if it’s worth the outsize investment of effort demanded by intercounty training.

The current problems in the county appeared to begin with the appointment of John O’Neill as manager but, to be strictly fair to him, the life force looked to be ebbing in the county anyway. Relegated for the second successive year to Division Four, any Fermanagh player would have known that a difficult league campaign beckoned.

Although it’s the basement group of the league it’s always a competitive environment. This season it contains Connacht champions Roscommon as well as counties, such as Longford and Wicklow, who have taken serious championship scalps in recent years.

In addition to this, Fermanagh suffers from the economic ruin that has hit the country with players opting to emigrate for work or, in the case of Ryan McCloskey, concentrate on a semi-professional soccer career to try to earn a living. Whatever the motivations, footballers have walked away and in a small county that level of withdrawal isn’t sustainable.

Counties don’t have the financial resources they had even a couple of years ago. Even big counties have to be careful of where they spend their money; others have to cut back.

Intercounty teams have become a source of tension within the GAA. Croke Park regularly issues warnings about the amount of cash spent on training costs yet major counties know that their senior teams are the biggest marketing tool at their disposal and a guaranteed source of promotion.

Less consistently successful counties can’t be assured of that level of exposure on a recurring basis and therefore the investment isn’t as easy to justify. But cutting back on the costs of managers and their back-room systems alienates players and makes the prospect of achieving a positive profile even more elusive.

The GAA and GPA mightn’t be able to devise a solution in Fermanagh but they’re right to be concerned. When it all falls apart in a smaller county, the integrity of the entire competitive structure suffers and in these straitened times it creates a worrying precedent. Some county has to be just above Kilkenny but the distinction should rotate.