Predictability has become the biggest obstacle to the growth of football and hurling, and the GAA needs to find an answer, writes Seán Moran

CROKE PARK gleamed through the louring clouds on Saturday like a diamond in the fog. One of the best matches of the year was being overshadowed by the cataclysmic weather, but the adversity turned into another opportunity for the great venue to prove its worth.

Most other grounds would have simply dissolved into darkness under the torrents that fell at half-time during the Kerry-Galway match, but Croke Park simply whirred and clicked, draining away the excess gallons from the pitch and bursting into floodlit glory.

Kerry rose to the occasion and equalled the highest score in an All-Ireland football quarter-final. Galway played their part, particularly in terms of skill and approach.

It was quixotic stuff, taking on Kerry in a shoot-out even in the Old Testament conditions, but it was entertaining.

A day later and a few hours' clement weather had transformed the stadium. Despite the rain and the four matches played already, the surface played well and to the satisfaction of the hurling teams.

Kilkenny, like their football counterparts the previous day, raised their game and knocked the last championship pretensions out of a long-running and much-decorated Cork team.

In the circumstances, it should have been a celebration, but the mood was more elegiac and not just amongst Cork supporters, whose support for the team continued to be phenomenal at the weekend. The core players who won three All-Irelands in the past 10 years were strong, single-minded characters, as their county board found out on more than one occasion.

That sort of relentlessness cannot, however, keep teams competitive at the top beyond their allotted time, and despite the heaving struggles against Galway and Clare turning out to be susceptible to their iron will, Cork learned they haven't the cards left to play at Kilkenny's table.

Given the presence of two exceptional teams in hurling and football it's hard to explain the downbeat feeling hovering around the championships. There have been grumbles about the quality of the football and lack of competitiveness in hurling. Some of the complaints have been exaggerated, but they aren't entirely groundless.

There have also been the perennial scare stories about falling attendances. Whereas they don't survive close scrutiny there is a lack of dynamism or growth in relation to crowds, which may not be significantly down but are not climbing steadily either.

The GAA has a perennial problem with its senior championships and that arises from their inherent competitive frailties. In some ways, Croke Park is lucky because it has its major box-office occasions regardless of external influences, such as govern the attendances at, say, soccer internationals.

On the other hand, the GAA has little control over its marquee competitions as they currently operate. Counties are generally bound by their history and traditions. Boundaries are unchanging and have inbuilt demographic inequalities. Both codes are geographically entrenched and in terms of elite competition show few signs of changing.

Dublin is there all of the time, turning out huge crowds and doing enough this decade to keep the vision of success shimmering over the heads of the team's vast support and - more important from the GAA's point of view - enough to regularly reach the All-Ireland play-offs. Any slippage in that status as contenders would have major implications at the turnstiles. But so far, so good.

But the rest of the returns are unpredictable. On taking office, GAA president Nickey Brennan spoke of the need to market the games more effectively, but as things stand there doesn't appear to be a sizeable, untapped audience for what are essentially stagnant championships.

Next month, for the first time, we could be seeing concurrent three-in-a-row successes in football and hurling, which for all the excellence of Kerry and Kilkenny doesn't do much for the unpredictability factor that stokes interest in the championships.

Unfortunately for the GAA, the current supremacies aren't great news on the revenue front either. For different reasons - distance from Dublin and small population respectively - Kerry and Kilkenny don't bring big crowds to Croke Park.

Even in Munster, the unfailing phenomenon of Cork-Kerry All-Ireland contests, together with their equally unfailing outcomes, have undermined interest in the counties' rivalry because, firstly, crowds have become too used to it and, secondly, the merciless terminations of Cork in August and September have driven home a message that the Munster contests are quaint sideshows.

The 2000s has been a decade of unprecedented format evolution in the championships and there's not a huge appetite for further change, but the trade-off between sudden death and the need for more matches is a vital consideration. Despite the increased demands on players and the logic of prolonging their championship season the public need good reasons to embrace matches that aren't knockout format.

Those good reasons relate to competitiveness. Munster finals haven't suffered from the new format because they have been hard to call. Leinster finals have on the other hand been badly hit because even the eternal optimists who support Wexford can't see light on the horizon when facing Kilkenny.

In football, the qualifiers breathed life into the championships because they liberated counties from old provincial tyrannies, but they haven't had enormous impact on the sharp end of the championship.

There have been impressive breakthroughs. At the weekend, Wexford reached a first All-Ireland football semi-final in 63 years. Four years ago Fermanagh reached the last four for the first time. For all the fresh opportunities on offer, there hasn't been a significant broadening of the contender base.

The eight years of the qualifiers have produced 12 All-Ireland semi-finalists, yet the preceding eight years, during which only provincial champions contested semi-finals, featured 14 different counties.

In hurling this has already proved Kilkenny's greatest decade of success - five All-Irelands with two yet to be decided - and in football Kerry are just one title off equalling their 1930s total of five.

Croke Park can only continue to promote and fund development schemes to try and bring on the games around the country, but identifying the formula that can foster talent as well as the structures in which it flourishes at the highest level is a tricky task.

smoran@irish-times.ie