Daly looks for 'Super Sunday' to lift league

NEVER HAS the climax to the National Hurling League been such an anti-climax. Even before the last round of matches on Sunday week, the Division One finalists are decided (Kilkenny and Tipperary) and so too is the team relegated to Division Two (Clare).

It wouldn’t be so bad if this wasn’t the format introduced two years ago to help breathe some life back into the competition. While it’s tempting to scratch the whole thing and start over, the GAA’s director of games, Pat Daly, believes the format can still work – with one significant alteration.

Daly is advocating a revised format whereby the different divisions still play off against each other, but rather than contest a final at the end of it, the last round would be termed “Super Sunday” where the points on offer are doubled from two to four.

“When the old system that was there was looked at the general feeling was that the two top divisions of six teams each wasn’t working,” says Daly, who was part of the Hurling Development Committee (HDC) that prompted the most recent change to the format.

“You had lob-sided games, and when you had Laois and Antrim, and whoever they were playing every week, generally the interest just wasn’t there, because the outcome was too predictable. Although I suppose you could say that now about anybody that is playing Kilkenny.

“But Division One now is a good deal more competitive. When you have eight top teams, nobody wants to drop out of that. And there’s only one team up and down, which means if you do drop out, it’s not as easy as you might think to get back up.”

The problem, says Daly, is building up a suitable climax, and ensuring teams still have something to play for going into the final round. As it stands the last round of matches in Division One – Clare v Galway, Kilkenny v Dublin, Cork v Waterford, Tipperary v Limerick – count for absolutely nothing.

“I’ve been pushing an idea here that the league should be played on a straight league format, with a bit of a difference. If you have seven games, you inevitably have an uneven number of home and away games. So you have four away, and three at home.

“I think if you have four away games then you’re entitled to four at home, but it’s not possible to structure the thing that way. To balance it you’d get the Super Sunday game at home, and there would be four points running on it.”

Daly’s system would see the team with four away games as having one and two away, three at home, four away, five at home, six away, and seven at home – but the difference being the seventh game would be a “Super Sunday”, and it would be a winner-take-all, four-point game.

“So you’d do away with the final altogether, and finish on a Super Sunday. And you couldn’t have a draw. You’d play until you get a result, whether that be the next score wins, because it would be a winner-take-all.

“The likelihood of having dead rubbers would be much less. For example, if Clare could win in the last round, and say Waterford were beaten, then Clare would jump them, if there were four points riding on the final game. You can’t say for certain you won’t have dead rubbers but the likelihood is that with four points running you probably won’t have.

“And I think it’s something to be looked at, in terms of the overall club balance, and between league and championship. Some people say we need to bring back semi-finals, but my belief is that as you expand your championship, and it has been expanded because of the qualifiers, then you have to contract your league. Because you can’t expand on every frontier.

“It tees up the championship as well. You know who the Super Sunday games are and you can promote that concept, in both hurling and football. That then becomes the springboard for the championship, as distinct from a round of games where there may not be anything of issue with a couple of teams, and you have teams playing the final who maybe have already played in the last couple of weeks.”

The National Leagues are controlled by Central Council, so ultimately it would be up to them to propose such a change through some central committee: “I think there is a lot of merit in it,” adds Daly. “The other feeling in hurling is that the league starts too early, and is too truncated. You’re getting too many games in February and less at this time of the year.”

This Sunday’s final round of matches in the National Football League isn’t quite as predictable. In Division One, there aren’t actually any dead rubbers. Westmeath are relegated but in their final match face a Dublin team needing to win well to avoid joining them.

Kerry have qualified for the final but should they fail to beat Galway, they will play the Connacht champions again for the title two weeks later.

Derry can creep into second place by virtue of scoring difference. At the moment they trail Galway by five points (16-21) but were Galway to lose their final match and Derry to beat Donegal it would require only relatively modest winning margins (say, two three-point wins) to turn that around in the holders’ favour.

At the other end of the table, Dublin, Donegal, Tyrone and Mayo could all accompany Westmeath although scoring difference makes the latter two less likely candidates.