Sean Moran: Decline in competitive games bound to affect attendances

Within five days the GAA faces into the prospect of a major international soccer tournament in which not just one but both Ireland teams will feature. The involvement of the Republic of Ireland is seen as the more problematic for Gaelic games, sucking as it does most of the oxygen out of the atmosphere for sports events south of the border.

On the basis of experience – Euro 2016 is the sixth such event in which Ireland has appeared in the past 28 years – there is no great cause for concern. These tournaments are all consuming at the time but the aftershocks are limited, probably because there’s such a broad-based floating interest in sport that big events are just that – big, regardless of their constituency.

Curiously the GAA has bounced back on a few occasions with memorable seasons within a year of high-profile soccer tournaments.

A year after the biggest of them all – Italia 90 – there came the Dublin-Meath saga.

After USA 94 we had the summer of Clare and the Guinness advertising campaigns and a heatwave whereas just three years ago in the wake of Euro 2012 there came another summer of Clare, again with soaring temperatures.

Great interest

All of which indicates that life goes on regardless. There will be great interest paid to the matches against

Sweden

,

Belgium

and

Italy

but, previous experience suggests, Gaelic games will continue to have their place.

None of that means that there are no problems. For a number of years at this stage the state of the championship and the interest in it has kept many in the GAA on edge. There are those who are ultra-sensitive to shifts in attendances at championship matches in the early part of the season and ready to extrapolate gloomy outcomes from the size of the crowds.

Through the veil of anxiety there is some light visible even if there’s no way of spinning the first few weeks of the championship as encouraging.

Crowds haven't been unequivocally bad but neither have they been good. For instance at Monaghan-Down at the weekend, 12,782 wasn't great but it was better than when the counties last met four years ago. In fact three of the four Ulster matches to date – Derry-Tyrone being the exception – have actually had bigger attendances than when the counties last met in the championship.

The problem in Ulster is the once famed razor’s edge of competitiveness has been fairly blunted with an average winning margin of double digits, 11 points, compared to just over three points 12 months ago.

If one of the reasons for alarm at national level is the threat to Ulster’s status as the one province where virtually anything could happen, it’s a bit misplaced given the hierarchies that have established themselves there but the integrity of competition is suffering with the results to date.

Everyone knows about Dublin and Mayo in their respective provinces. Mayo are on the verge of setting a record for successive Connacht titles whereas the All-Ireland champions are set to equal the six-in-a-row benchmark in Leinster set by Wexford 100 years ago and equalled by Kevin Heffernan's team of the 1970s.

Even Kerry, challenged regularly by Cork even in their All-Ireland pomp of the past two decades, are closing in on a four-in-a-row, which hasn’t been achieved since Mick O’Dwyer’s time.

The point of repeating these statistics is that the atrophying of competition in the provinces is bound to impact on crowds eventually. The Munster hurling championship usually carries the GAA through the Doldrums of May and early June but this year there has been a little trumpeted Cork-Tipp clash, anticipation undermined by the pessimism in Cork, and if Waterford and Clare provided a memorable few weeks over the past month or so the crowds were underwhelming.

Then again the numbers were superior to the counties’ last championship meeting three years ago – coincidentally Clare’s last win in the province – and it has to be factored in that the two counties for all their current prosperity come from the wrong side of the tracks in Munster tradition and have for the past 20 years been more capable of rising indignantly to the challenge of Cork and Tipperary than to each other’s.

The anxiety about public interest is more of a modern concern. Forty years ago no-one apart from Dublin or Kerry won the All-Ireland for nine years and it’s the Golden Years. There were however two distinctions: Dublin were occasionally challenged in Leinster and Kerry generally were in Munster. Under Jim Gavin Dublin’s average winning margin in the Leinster championship – finals included – has been in double digits.

Less focus

Secondly the old knockout format meant that counties played, lost and disappeared, which meant there was less focus on them and a thinner calendar with teams ambling along towards the All-Ireland semi-finals with lengthy breaks.

It would be foolish to discard all that the qualifiers have brought; some fine matches, great days out for counties like Wexford and Fermanagh and the institution of the All-Ireland quarter-finals. But there is a drawback. It's a problem that will take some resolution in that a greater number of fixtures with a declining rate of competitiveness ultimately has to impact on attendances. smoran@irishtimes.com