The final weekend of the football league is upon us, with three divisions full of intrigue, and one division – unfortunately for everyone, the top tier – with a rather more complex set of motivations.
I note with interest that even TG4, which can hardly be blamed for having previously focused most of its attention this season on the top eight – where the best teams are playing each other – has switched it up for this coming weekend, with Louth v Meath from Division Two and Clare v Offaly from Division Three featuring as two of its three games shown in full on Sunday afternoon.
It will be showing any games from Divisions One and Two that aren’t on live TV on its Spórt TG4 YouTube channel, which is a brilliant service ... but it is still noteworthy that Division One teams are getting shunted online. Noteworthy, but hardly surprising.
Jim McGuinness said two weeks ago that he was going to do what was best for Donegal football in the remaining rounds of a league competition his team were at that moment leading. And that’s exactly what he did last Sunday, making a raft of changes and losing to Tyrone at home. They have Derry seven days after the league final, and they know precisely where their priorities lie. It’s hard to argue.
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But, with all due respect, this can’t really be allowed to stand for too much longer. The national league stretches back to the 1920s. It’s a very fine competition in its own right, and plenty of winners have celebrated it lustily. But at this moment in time, reaching the league final (and when I say the league, for now I’m talking about the linear final, the Division One final) is talked about in roughly the same terms as an outbreak of cholera in the camp.
You couldn’t really be overly happy if you were the tournament sponsors, watching how the last couple of weeks of what had been a brilliant league have played out. But every weekend is precious now in a way that it just wasn’t even five years ago. It’s not just Allianz that have reason to be annoyed. As a fan, as a consumer of the games, why are we spending more than a third of the entire intercounty calendar watching a competition no one in the top division wants to win?
The problem is that we want to ease the players’ workloads, to give teams a break between the league final and the start of the championship. The solution is to play fewer games. A way to do that is to have a league of three conferences (of 10, 12 and 10 teams) and every team plays five games. You don’t play everyone in your conference, but that’s fine – in fact, it’s something that’s been normalised now in sport. First it happened in the NFL (the American version), then it happened in the European Rugby Champions Cup, and this season there was the “Swiss model” in the Champions League.
A schedule which looks broadly fair could be drawn up, everyone plays their five games and we have three finals instead of four, if we want to persist with those. You could split the three conferences into 1A and 1B, 2A and 2B, 3A and 3B if you wanted, with the group winners playing each other in a final, as has been suggested to me by Paul Flynn and Jamie Wall since I started talking about this. Both solutions get you the desired result.
The intercounty managers could even be consulted on this. Having been roundly ignored on the rules, this is one situation where it might be better to have them inside the tent shouting out, rather than outside the tent shouting in (you could also replace shouting with any other verb you fancy there). How many games do you want to play? It’s a simple question.
[ Time to revisit proposal to scrap football league finalsOpens in new window ]
It would give us the opportunity to enshrine three tiers as the model going forward in league and championship, too. The league is massively important to teams in the lower divisions. But many of these teams are playing their most important, meaningful seven games of the year before Easter, on bad pitches and in terrible weather conditions.
That’s not right either. They deserve to play their most important games in the summertime, just like everyone else. A third tier, as is the case in every county club schedule (senior, intermediate and junior), lets everyone find their level. No one would start a championship season devoid of hope.
When people go looking for extra weekends in the schedule to offset the situation facing Donegal over the next few weeks, they inevitably look at pushing the All-Ireland finals back, as if that wouldn’t have a catastrophic effect on counties such as Cork and Galway who run a full programme of club championships in hurling and football.
They never look at the competition that teams are currently pulling the handbrake up in and trying not to win, or are desperately trying to win but are being hamstrung by having to play during freezing cold temperatures in January, or freak weather events in February. If we can all agree the league is too rushed, there are options. Don’t ask me – ask the NFL, the EPCR, and Uefa. If it’s good enough for their flagship events, it’s certainly good enough for our currently unloved secondary competition.
