Seán Moran: Football Championship gets serious after slow start and rush to judgment

Hey, how about all that rushing to judgment of the football championship! Now, you won’t find too loud a condemnation of it here – the unpalatable consequence of a couple of weeks’ calling out flaws that appeared to rectify themselves the following week.

Too many teams in the Sam Maguire round-robin?

Only one county, Clare, gone by the final weekend, no one on full points and just two unbeaten sides, Derry and Dublin by the time it all ended.

League status the defining differential after the first two weekends when only Cork had beaten a (marginally) higher-ranked county, Louth? No. The last round of eight matches at the weekend saw only three counties, ranked above their opponents in the league actually winning their fixture: Derry, Dublin and Kerry.

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It helped of course that the much acclaimed western spring offensive, which saw Mayo, Galway and Roscommon finish as the top three in Division One, ran into awful trouble last Sunday with all of them losing to teams who will spend next season in Division Two.

So, it turned out to be a lot less predictable than I – and I daresay, even Croke Park itself – had foreseen.

For instance, this weekend there are four home teams, the status earned by coming second in their respective groups, and not one of them was meant to be there.

One by one, Donegal, Kildare and Cork won matches they hadn’t been favoured to win and in so doing, leapfrogged their more fancied opponents into second place. Galway, alone of the provincial champions, lost a match they were favourite to win, and forfeited the top spot in Group Two as a result.

Does this justify the whole structure and its finger-drumming, slow-burn processes? Of course not but it means that it presumably merits another go and is unlikely to be subject to a panicky fix when the CCCC reviews the whole thing at the end of the summer.

It is likely the GAA will take the full three years, indicated at the 2022 annual congress, to assess the merits of the structure, although every projection made less than a full season into the new format runs the risk of being turned on its head.

[ GAA fixtures, TV details and team news ahead of the weekend ]

The round-robin has been an ambitious undertaking given the mixed experience of the format, but it set out to guarantee matches to counties once they had exited the provincial championships: guaranteed three matches, everyone on the same starting line.

On the basis of reactions to date, it would appear that players and teams are broadly in support of the additional matches. Obviously, winning teams are going to feel positive about format but Ian Maguire, the long serving Cork centrefielder, was not alone in identifying the advantage of the sequence of championship matches when speaking after the county’s first championship defeat of Mayo in 21 years.

“We knew it wasn’t going to be easy, but these are the games [where] we have to start proving that we’re in contention,” Maguire said.

“We earned that right on Sunday, but now we have to prove our worth again. We’re really looking forward to it, it’s been an unbelievable season so far, very enjoyable.”

The more a developing team plays, the better they get.

Kildare’s Daniel Flynn had a more downbeat view despite a similarly positive context, in his case providing an assist for Kevin Feely’s winning score against Roscommon.

He candidly remarked that with the round-robin and “the attendances down”, it didn’t “feel like championship”.

Flynn’s remarks echoed commonly held reservations, but the trade-off being made is that the additional fixtures help teams to get closer to potential with a proper sequence of matches.

Wexford manager John Hegarty emphasised this point last week in an interview with The Irish Times when reflecting on his own playing days and what he sees as the value of the tier two Tailteann Cup.

“If you were a team like Wexford, trying to make progress, you always felt each year that you were starting farther and farther behind the best counties,” Hegarty said.

As he suggested, the top teams were developing collective identity, residual fitness and tactical familiarity.

“On a basic level, that’s a real benefit of the Tailteann Cup and the new system.”

At the end of the season, the number crunchers in Croke Park will be analysing attendances to see what, if any, shortfall they are dealing with in the first year of this format.

Crowds may pick up from now, as the axe starts to fall in earnest. It took a little more than two months to lose four teams. We’ll lose another four this weekend as well as the weekend after.

Round-robin has never been a hugely successful format in Gaelic games despite the success of Munster hurling this year. Originally conditioned by pure knockout, supporters find the concept of following teams through thick and thin unappealing. Consequently smaller attendances were always likely.

League finalists Mayo and Galway had been giddily talked up as potentially providing an all-Connacht All-Ireland final. Instead, one of their trails will end in the preliminary quarter-final.

Twenty-five years ago they met in Castlebar in a first round. John O’Mahony’s Galway, who went on to lift Sam Maguire in September, were the winners. Mayo had been in the previous two All-Ireland finals but their year was dead, knocked on the head in the second-last week of May. That was jeopardy, but for such an all-in championship match, the attendance was a modest 23,390.

[ Jim McGuinness: In the blink of an eye, my dark horse Galway became a shade darker ]

Already, a little more than 24 hours after the draw, half that number of tickets have been shifted for Saturday.

This year’s exercise in expanding the number of fixtures has inevitably thinned the early excitement but equally, has given teams more fulfilling and constructive seasons.

Lets see where it takes us.