In what has become as troubled a year for the GAA as any in recent memory, one issue is beginning to rise above the tumult caused by all the individual crises. It has been an increasing anomaly in recent years and lies at the heart of several problems. The knockout format, which is exclusively used in the football championship and with a couple of exceptions in the hurling, is becoming a crushing burden on the GAA as a whole.

Discipline has been a recurrent difficulty, partly because of the anarchic reality which informs much GAA activity and partly because of various high-profile outbreaks of disorder. The knockout format bears some responsibility for this because it creates the pressurised environment in which players perform.

It is accepted that this isn't a complete excuse for indiscipline, as last year's replayed Munster hurling final featured plenty despite being one of the two championship matches where winning wasn't central to the future of the season.

Nonetheless, in general terms the knowledge that your season may last 70 minutes after all the dedication and obsessive preparation obviously creates a situation where fired-up players can lose control. The effectiveness of disciplinary sanction isn't helped either by the realisation that there won't be another match for a year.

Back in March the decision not to recommend match-based and competition-specific suspensions was a flaw in the otherwise commendable report by the GAA's Disciplinary Sub-committee. One of the reasons given for the decision was that it could mean certain players could miss three years of championship simply by getting a three-match suspension.

If counties were to be guaranteed a certain number of matches each summer, a match-based disciplinary system for the championships would make sense. It would enable suspensions to be accepted as part of the governing norms of intercounty activity, rather than a plot to subvert a particular team's chances.

As club and county disciplinary tribunals have been separated, so too should disciplinary measures applicable to each level. Players could then be judged by their actions at either level. This would enable a central authority to have jurisdiction over all inter-county competition and local units to administer local affairs - but without any crossover between the two.

In this way, we could all be spared re-enactments of The Field as individual counties devise ways of evading the consequences of indiscipline by star players.

Discipline is not the only area which would benefit from an extended championship format. It was notable in the recent controversies affecting Carlow and Tipperary that much emphasis was laid on the amount of training done by the players. It's the same every year. The statistics flood out of beaten dressing-rooms - 100 training sessions in the year, 150, 200.

It was a perfectly valid argument for Cyril Hughes to make on behalf of his Carlow team after the fiasco against Westmeath, but his target was wrong. The referee made mistakes that day for whatever reason, but even if he hadn't Carlow might still have lost and the players' gruelling vigils would still have been in vain.

The obvious absurdity is not how a team comes to lose a match, but the consequences of losing it.

Last Sunday, there was more evidence for the prosecution. Michael O'Grady attracted a fair bit of attention by suggesting the media wipe egg off its collective face, apparently for correctly predicting that his Dublin team would lose to Wexford (I'm still cleaning up after incorrectly predicting a year ago that they would beat Kilkenny in a match they lost by 21 points).

Yet it was his more sustained (and sustainable) argument about the shortcomings of the championship which made most sense. Teams like Dublin need more than one championship match in a year if they are to progress at all. Since losing narrowly in the 1991 Leinster final to Kilkenny, Dublin have been drawn against Wexford or Kilkenny every year, although in 1997, they negotiated a preliminary round against Westmeath before proceeding to play Kilkenny.

Developing a team in such circumstances is difficult and O'Grady, together with the Dublin county board, has constantly pressed for a format that would enable teams to be guaranteed more than one match in a season.

Derry footballer Joe Brolly said on Network 2's The Game on Monday that the GAA should consider a league-based championship format. His proposal of four eight-team divisions is probably a bit optimistic, but the basic premise that counties should have more matches during the summer is sound.

Reform is all the more necessary now that we have reached a stage at which the National Leagues appear to have lost critical mass and disintegrated. After a few years of the competitions being slowly relegated by counties to the status of championship preparation, the public saw through the whole exercise and stayed away in droves.

The combined attendance at the League finals was 23,000, a figure which would have regarded as disappointing for either of them only a year ago.

In other words, you can't keep repeating the mantra that the league is the second most important competition when there's a good chance that it isn't - either with players or spectators - and even if it is, it's so distant a second as to be irrelevant.

Sports which organise their main competition, in this case the championship, on a knock-out basis run the obvious risks of an insufficiency of matches. At a time when public interest in the championship is running high, the waste of promotional opportunity is plain.

The usual argument against providing a decent summer programme is that club activities would suffer. It's a nettle that Croke Park is going to have to grasp anyway, as already county championships are being thrown into disarray by being postponed pending the end of the county's championship run.

If the inter-county championships are the games' shop windows, they have to be facilitated and their season separated from the club championships. During the inter-county season, club competitions should be organised and played without county players.

As with many things in the GAA, change will come eventually. Already the hurling championship has embraced the dilution of the knock-out format. Next year it is expected that Munster and Leinster will initiate round-robin systems for their weaker counties in order to guarantee a minimum number of matches.

Pressure will then come from other counties and ultimately some variation on a league system will be instituted. Then we'll all be wondering how we put up with the current carry-on as long as we did.

E-mail: smoran@irish-times.ie