League in a backwater

The Church & General National Football League restarts tomorrow with a full programme of matches in the four divisions. The competition is under increasing pressure to hold on to its previously undisputed status as the second most important prize in football.

A combination of factors have undermined this status but most refer back to the ever-narrowing focus of teams on the championship.

In recent months, the signs have been again visible. The growth of the club championships have provided a coherent aspiration for a far greater number of players than inter-county activity and whereas the summer All-Irelands retain the genuine elitist attraction of being proving-grounds for the best teams, the league falls short of that appeal.

During the controversy generated by the failure of either of last year's league winners to gain representation on the 1998 All Stars selection, it was argued that this reflected not the priorities of those selecting the team but the priorities of the real world.

Records speak for themselves. In the last 10 years, only two teams have added an All-Ireland to the league title in the one year. It can be argued that the fact that both counties came from Munster wasn't coincidental. Both Cork in 1989 and particularly Kerry in 1997 had ample time to recover from the exertions of winning the National League - neither having a top-class championship test for months afterwards.

Contrast that with the more conventional experience of the 1990s: six teams who crashed so disappointingly in the subsequent championship that they failed to win their province and in half the cases failed to reach their provincial final.

Only last year, Offaly added the league to their Leinster title from the previous August. Yet within three weeks they had been drilled out of the championship in a first-round match with Meath.

By November, Offaly were admitting that retaining the league title formed no realistic part of their plans for this season - an approach that if disputed by management, was all too evident on the field.

There are a couple of reasons for this indifference and the poor track record of league winners is as much a symptom of the problems as a cause of them. First, there is the disjunction between league and championship. The first half of the National Football League campaign is more like a postscript to the championship than a new beginning.

Since the conclusion of the first part of the programme, there has been a break of over two months which means that half of the league is of little use in creating a cohesive panel and establishing momentum for the new year. There is far more of a sense of beginning about the resumption of activity this weekend.

Second, the competition structure is meandering, a hybrid of league and knockout which kills the incentive to contest every match that vigorously because on the law of averages, a team can reach the play-offs by getting its house in order on the resumption.

The football development committee looked at the current season and identified the lack of continuity as one of the issues needing reform. Their preference for switching to a calendar year, as hurling did two seasons ago, had to be tempered by the realpolitik of the fixture list and the cosmetic option of switching one series of matches from October to February was the outcome.

Clubs in certain parts of the country have been extremely critical of the impact on their activities of having to adapt to a hurling league being played between March and May. Were football to follow suit, such complaints would intensify.

Yet there is an inexorable feeling that the GAA will have to embrace the calendar year in football. The marketing of hurling has benefited enormously from the championship reforms which have led to more top-class championship matches.

The drift of this is clear: that a league system - at least a system where one defeat didn't automatically mean the loss of a team, particularly a top team - would be the best way of extending the number of championship fixtures. There may be arguments that would lead to the same hybrid which doesn't work in the current league structure but that would ignore the greater urgency with which teams approach the championship.

Running the league and championship in parallel isn't as promising a prospect because the National Hurling League experiment two years ago indicated that teams which have advanced in the championship do not wish to jeopardise their prospects in the premier competition and so pay the league no attention whereas teams eliminated from the championship have no further interest in life.

The team that bucked this trend was Limerick and their honest effort resulted in the county winning the league but this didn't stop manager Tom Ryan being shortly afterwards fired by the county board for championship shortcomings.

The solution to the fixture list problem may be starting to materialise with the increased use of Saturdays this spring. Two programmes of hurling league matches will be played on Saturdays in March and April and if that proves successful, will provide the template for accommodating both football and hurling league series in the calendar year.