On Gaelic Games:The arrival of the qualifier system, new records, the sub-letting of a new Croke Park and the GPA's emergence all had a huge impact, writes SEAN MORAN

IN THREE weeks the most momentous decade in the GAA’s history will come to an end. It’s rare that a period of time as random as 10 successive years ranged from one ending in zero to one ending in nine could encapsulate such real and emblematic change.

Records have been set in both football and hurling. The All-Ireland championships format changed radically for the first time in over a century, and the last of the GAA’s exclusion rules were voted down. A newly completed Croke Park was added to the city’s busy skyline and a players’ representative body was accepted in partnership with the association.

It doesn’t seem that long ago, but the last few months of 1999 could have taken place in a different world. Snapshots from the traditional events that mark the fall of a year are revealing. That September’s hurling final between Cork and Kilkenny certainly wasn’t novel, even if the counties hadn’t met for seven years, but the world was changing. In a rare example of Cork actually winning against expectation by the same minimalist margin that Kilkenny were used to inflicting on them, you could note two things in retrospect.

Firstly a slight, ball-playing corner forward, Seánie McGrath, glided around the Cork attack giving one of the decade’s best defenders, Willie O’Connor, a troubled 70 minutes on a wet and muddy afternoon not made for tricky, elusive hurlers.

Between the 55th and 62nd minutes McGrath conjured three points from the mire to level the final and set the stage for a Cork victory. A decade later and there is virtually no role for technically gifted players who lack the heft and physical aggression to win their own possession and the disposition to chase down every ball regardless of percentages.

On what was a bitterly disappointing afternoon for Kilkenny and their new manager, Brian Cody, one consolation came in the display of 20-year-old rookie forward Henry Shefflin, the only member of a previously rampant attack to raise his game for the All-Ireland final.

Cody would go on to set about gradually eliminating all of his teams’ weaknesses, whether in terms of skill, temperament or physique, and he did so by building around the galvanic presence of Shefflin, who blossomed into one of the greatest hurlers of any era.

Two weeks later and a traditionally styled Meath team, driven by their outstanding centrefielder John McDermott and orchestrated by one of the decade’s most intelligent footballers, Trevor Giles, did enough to defeat Cork.

Teams never know when they’ve crested a hill, but not alone would Meath and their legendarily successful manager Seán Boylan not win another All-Ireland in the 10 years that followed, but the whole of Leinster would follow suit and become the fourth-placed and least prosperous football province throughout this decade. This hadn’t happened since the 1930s.

Instead, football’s centre of gravity moved north. There was the predictable rush to acclaim Joe Kernan and Mickey Harte and focus on the advanced coaching programmes in operation across Ulster, but Kerry, as they always have been, were willing to adapt. Jack O’Connor’s autobiography freely admits to downloading drills from the Ulster Council website.

The failure to beat Tyrone in three meetings may well irritate Kerry, but, after a decade in which five All-Irelands were won, they’ll get over it.

But the biggest development in football arguably wasn’t who won what and when but rather how. A special congress just 10 months into the new decade approved the All-Ireland qualifier system. The effects were principally two-fold. Counties unfamiliar with success of any sort were liberated to go on runs along the outside track: Sligo, Westmeath, Fermanagh and Wexford to name the obvious examples.

Second, it institutionalised an elite All-Ireland field. Although Armagh’s granite self-belief and Tyrone’s perfectly deployed talent bank powered a way to maiden All-Irelands in 2002 and ’03 by winning their province in conventional fashion, the most significant point about the qualifiers was evident in the very first year of the system.

Galway’s second All-Ireland under John O’Mahony was the template for what followed in the decade. The five back-door All-Irelands have all come about with counties that had won a conventional All-Ireland within the previous two or three years, had apparently run out of gas but through reinvention and a transformative victory against – coincidentally in all cases – either Armagh or Dublin rebounded to claim the Sam Maguire.

Dublin chief executive John Costello has put the case in his annual report for an overhaul of the system, and, although anxious to avoid the charge of special pleading, he understands that his county’s inability to make anything of five successive Leinster titles gives him a specific, albeit not unique, perspective.

The amazing thing about Kilkenny’s mammoth haul of seven All-Irelands in the past 10 years is that they have never required the assistance of the qualifiers. It mightn’t have been the most competitive of eras, but that was as much Kilkenny’s doing as anyone else’s.

In September 1999, the last All-Irelands were viewed from the old Hogan Stand. Within three years the new stadium had been completed, for the first time on the basis of an integrated design – a project embarked upon amid concerns that the financial burden would cripple the association and which ended with Croke Park contributing millions a year to the GAA.

A sizeable proportion of that revenue has recently come from the renting out of the venue to rugby and soccer, a seismic shift brought about by the congress of 2005 accepting that exclusion of other sports was no longer desirable or beneficial.

Of at least equal significance was the second-last of the GAA bans to fall.

By November 2001 the prohibition on Northern security force personnel joining the association stretched back nearly a century, but as soon as the PSNI was formed the GAA knew that it had to avoid becoming an obstacle to young nationalists’ joining the police.

That was done and dusted after a quietly persuasive tour of Ulster counties by then president Seán McCague and an in camera special congress.

Now the PSNI compete in the Ulster business houses competition and only recently faced the Garda in the final of the International Police football tournament, the first GAA event attended by DUP sports minister Nelson McCausland.

All in all, a long way to travel in 10 years.