Let’s all calm down, the championship is not in crisis

So, has dry rot been suddenly discovered in the football championship? That musty smell we’ve been getting for years and meant to do something about: is that what it is? Jeez – the entire building!

The early stages of the championships are traditional breeding grounds for panic of one sort or another. Crowds down, soccer tournaments eating into the concentration span of sports followers and now the GAA’s primary competition is apparently no longer fit for purpose.

By early June the island is full of distressed noises. Better teams are massacring worse teams. Apparently counties with big populations and consequent access to enhanced resources and fund raising are just going to dominate the championship. Imagine!

In recent years there has been a transition from the traditional championship to the concept of a season – a coherent competitive entity that can be “sold” to sponsors and broadcasters as something similar to what they can get from rugby and soccer.

In case we forget, the traditional championship was a one-day outing for half of the counties. No-one was going to get too worked up over that, players or supporters.

The national league was spread as thinly as a sheet of filo pastry across the year from October to May with the result that there was no coherent programme for the vast majority of players. What few teams were going to subject themselves to flat-out training in order to play eight matches in nine months?

The point here is that for most, inter-county competition was effectively an occasional activity, by invitation. There were a number of counties for whom it was all like a Lions rugby tour or the old Ryder Cup: get selected, assemble, take your beating and go home.

Sometimes the truly awesome scale of the defeat created ripples. Kerry's 36-point demolition of Clare, the Milltown Massacre of 1979, prompted the Munster Council essentially to prohibit the county for a year from playing anyone in the province except Cork.

But the history of relationships between the strong and the weak in Munster football is dysfunctional and splattered with violent beatings. What has happened in recent weeks reflects a difference of degree, not kind.

It's unsightly to see Tipperary and Waterford getting trimmed by Kerry but over the previous 40 years their average defeat in the same fixtures was running at more than 12 and 18 points respectively. What's just happened – 17- and 26-point reverses – hardly redefined those rivalries.

Unequal society
As for resources, the GAA like the world at large is an unequal society. Allowing for the demographic complexities in Northern Ireland, roughly half of the counties have populations of 100,000 or more. Of the 250 All-Ireland titles won since the championships began in 1887, all but 46 have ended up in these counties. Take out Kilkenny's 32 hurling titles and the figure is 14.

Some small counties punch above their weight and some better resourced ones under-achieve. That too is life.

The reason one suspects that this is now an issue is that counties, who used to dip in and out of inter-county activity currently must go to the logistical and preparatory trouble of organising a pre-season in January, running a league campaign through February and March into April, getting ready for the championship and then planning the gap until the qualifiers.

What sustains them?

The big question for the GAA – the balance it has to strike in inter-county activity – is what makes the effort worthwhile for counties? What structure holds out the possibility of some class of achievement for all but also rewards the best teams and engages public interest?

Promotion in the league matters because spring status increasingly determines summer potential but because of their place in the calendar, league titles are always seen as interim targets.

Attempts to sustain graded championships have nearly always failed. Counties who haven't been within an ass's roar of doing anything even vaguely notable in senior championship can consider themselves too good for competitions like the Murphy Cup.

Similarly, teams thrashed in championship sometimes lose the will to re-write their summer narrative in the qualifiers. Yet the experiment that Division Four teams not be allowed enter the qualifiers caused uproar once everyone realised what they had voted for.

Catering for such varying levels of motivation isn’t easy when everyone wants to be part of the big race no matter that some have as much chance of contesting – let alone winning – it as the cheery souls who take the starter’s gun at marathons dressed as the Mad Hatter.

There's too much angst about at present. The dismal record of Division Two teams to date in the championship – only Louth have actually won a match – must be seen in the context of the strongest Division One in a long time.

The All-Ireland has been won by five different counties in successive years and going back farther by 10 in 20 years. It’s as competitive as I can ever remember it and so what if that competitiveness is being driven by rising standards amongst the elite? Championships are won by the best team.

Is there a problem?