Does Galway’s win suggest hurling league has become dysfunctional?

Nothing summed up the hurling league, which wrapped up on Sunday, quite as succinctly as the reaction of the two managers after a final that provided a bracing corrective to the idea that Tipperary were threatening to lap the field in the race for this year's All-Ireland.

Tipp manager Michael Ryan questioned the burden on his players of the current format with club matches coming up between now and the Munster quarter-final against Cork.

“As I say, eight games in 10 weeks – eight high-calibre games, as far as I was concerned – certainly seems to have taken its toll on us.”

For his Galway counterpart, Micheál Donoghue, the experience had been the opposite.

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“We said it from day one, obviously everyone wants to be playing the top teams but 1B gave the opportunity to bring in some of the younger lads and give them an opportunity to play for Galway.”

In the last three years, the league title has been won outright by 1B counties and at the same time there has been a steadily rising level of complaint from 1A managers that the regulation matches, far from being useful exposure to the best sides in the country, were too cut-throat, too helter-skelter an environment, to trial players satisfactorily.

Tipperary have four weeks to sort themselves out before playing a Cork team rather more alive, you'd imagine, with a sense of the possible than would have been the case last week

Ryan’s initial reaction to the 16-point walloping by Galway was to wonder if his players had been worn out by the rigours of life in the top division and question how it would affect his players with championship on the horizon.

Dublin footballer Diarmuid Connolly made the point last week that a league final defeat gives a team a prolonged period of remorse – the most extensive the majority of players can get in-season with weeks until the next match. Tipperary have four weeks to sort themselves out before playing a Cork team rather more alive, you'd imagine, with a sense of the possible than would have been the case last week.

Competitive

The most recurring comments about the hurling league are to do with its format. There’s no point in re-running all the arguments about how grafting two distinct hierarchical divisions together for a knockout phase makes no sense or is unfair. That has been well answered by the CCCC position that the GAA were asked for a competitive format and provided one.

The more puzzling issue is how just a few brief years of the current format have transformed long-held beliefs about the nature of the league and its most desirable structure.

Sunday’s blitz by Galway was notable for the quality of the winners’ performance and its sheer relentless consistency – a quality that has proved elusive for the county for quite a while – but also for the fact that this was the third successive year that a team from what is notionally and practically the lower tier had won the title.

When the present format was introduced in 2012 it was deemed competitive but managers at the top end of 1B, with its 50-50 split between haves looking to get back into the top division and have-nots anxious not to be regraded into a ghetto with all the better counties moved out, protested that their championship prospects were compromised by exclusion from the elite level.

That argument got hit on the head when, in the first two years, three of the four available provincial titles went to counties who had been in the lower division.

The remaining complaint of not enough matches was fixed in 2014 but the introduction of quarter-finals between the top four counties in Divisions 1A and 1B was viewed as lopsided and unfair: the gulf between the divisions would be too great and was it fair that the fourth team in 1B should get farther in the competition that the fifth side in 1A?

Received wisdom

This year there were three counties in 1B with hopes of promotion – Wexford, Galway and Limerick – and three with hopes of not being relegated, Offaly, Laois and Kerry. The received wisdom has been that this type of county want to be able to measure themselves against the best but Laois manager Eamonn Kelly, who has also had charge of Offaly and Kerry, made the point in these pages earlier this month that there was a downside.

Croke Park have correctly refused to be stampeded into changing the format  but it's looking likely that some re-thinking is going to have to take place in the next 12 months

“Last year we got to the quarter-final as well and got a big beating from Kilkenny, which doesn’t do you any good. You can’t give out about the big teams either – they’ve got competitive panels and aren’t going to ease up.”

The reality of hurling is that its competitive field varies from time to time and structures have to take that into account. Formats have skipped around between eight- or (as currently) six-team hierarchical divisions to two six- or seven-team team groups of mixed ability in the top tier.

Croke Park have correctly refused to be stampeded into changing the format ahead of a scheduled revision in a year’s time but it’s looking likely that some re-thinking is going to have to take place in the next 12 months.

The intense competitiveness of 1A – five different counties have been relegated in the past five seasons – has been good for attendances and the quality of the fixtures, but if the structure is developing into an incentive to be in the lower tier, that is dysfunctional and has to be addressed.

smoran@irishtimes.com