John Hegarty: ‘The system in 2000 benefited the weaker teams’

As the focus tightens on what structure the football championship should take, it’s worth remembering that 21 years ago, Leinster Council fired the first shots in the format revolution by introducing a round-robin system for the four weakest counties.

It gave way to the All-Ireland qualifiers in 2001, with further changes in 2007 (the diverting of Division Four counties into a Tier 2 championship, the Tommy Murphy Cup, rather than the qualifiers, which lasted just two years) and the introduction of round-robin All-Ireland quarter-finals in 2018.

The Leinster initiative took place in May 2000 and the rationale was that whoever emerged would have had three competitive matches to prepare. Ultimately, Wexford won the mini-league but were well beaten by Dublin. A year later, the All-Ireland qualifiers were introduced.

With the current proposals including the importation of the league into the championship from an early stage, rather than the elite “Super 8s” of recent years, how did the idea function at the turn of the millennium?

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John Hegarty was a Wexford regular in those days and says that the rationale was correct in that the system strengthened the team for the quarter-finals.

"It certainly did. It was pre-qualifiers and meant that we were getting a couple of games. At that time the killer was that we trained as much as the top teams – I'm not saying at the same quality or intensity, but I was at UCD [on the 1996 Sigerson-winning team] with Trevor Giles, Brian Dooher, John Divilly and David Nestor, so I knew what Meath and Tyrone, Galway and Mayo were doing.

Getting beaten

“We were training as hard but getting beaten in the first round, so while we were going back to our clubs the top counties had another couple of months in the championship. The next year you were automatically behind because you simply hadn’t the body of work done that they had done.

“That year, because we had the couple of games, it was great because we were winning but also because it felt like a championship run, which hadn’t happened before. Ultimately we came out of that and we weren’t ready to play a good Dublin side, but it was a few rungs up the ladder and progressed us more in a year than the old system would have in two or three.

“Taking that as a starting point, we built and built and ended up in Division One a couple of years later with a lot of the same players, and in the 2005 league final against Armagh. It was definitely beneficial at the time.”

He never saw the qualifiers as primarily intended to facilitate less-successful teams.

“Allowing that we reached an All-Ireland semi-final in 2008 [after his retirement] and Fermanagh a few years previously, the qualifiers effectively benefited the stronger teams, whereas the system in 2000 benefited the weaker teams.”

Hegarty is cautiously positive about the league-based proposal for October’s special congress.

“Looked at objectively there is merit, but how it is branded and pitched will be vital. There was a clear purpose to the provincial league, which was to progress to a quarter-final. It was unfortunate for us that it was Dublin, who had a few All-Ireland medallists from a couple of years before, but I think we’d have been confident against one of the middle-tier Leinster teams.

“If it was properly branded and properly presented, yes, I think it would be beneficial.”

Sceptical

He is more sceptical about the Tailteann Cup, the GAA’s latest proposed tiered championship, accepting that Wexford were unfairly dismissive of the Murphy Cup over a decade ago.

“We were as much at fault for that as anyone else. We should have been delighted to be in a final and doing everything we could to win it. Instead, we were thinking that we’d gone past that sort of thing but we shouldn’t have.

“Most football teams are realistic about All-Ireland prospects but believe that they are training at a level that deserves respect.

“I’m going to wait and see. If the teams buy into it and commit to winning it, if it becomes really competitive, then fantastic.

“But if it’s just to patronise teams, then no.”