Seán Moran: Players’ voices alone may not be enough to get Option B over the line

The Gaelic Players’ Association got with the programme last week and conducted a detailed briefing session for media, to promote their advocacy of Option B – the league-based proposal – in the football championship reform debate.

It was a great deal different to back in 2017 when the round-robin All-Ireland football quarter-finals, or Super 8s as they became known were due up at congress.

Just the day before congress began, the GPA issued a statement saying that the players would oppose the idea of the round-robin quarter-finals. Predictably this rather late intervention was never going to exert much influence, even if it helped to fuel an explosion of wrath on social media when the proposals were slightly unexpectedly carried.

There had been reasons. Then GPA chief executive, Dermot Early had been appointed only a month previously and vowed to embark on a vigorous schedule of consultation. Complicating matters was that he, in a personal capacity, had a few months earlier had been supportive of the plan.

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A large majority of the players consulted, 70 per cent, turned out to be opposed to the idea. The reasons given weren’t the most compelling, essentially a lack of consultation – despite the GPA being represented on Central Council – and unhappiness with the plight of the less successful counties for whom no format was going to guarantee progress.

Even when the Tailteann Cup, for a tier two championship, was being debated two and a half years later, the GPA opposed the idea because of a lack of fixtures for the counties involved.

These interventions gave the impression that the players’ body were content to carp on the sidelines, unhappy with any proposals brought forward and unable to secure agreement on their own blueprint.

So, last week’s presentation was a welcome advance on previous positions. It dismissed Option A, establishing four provincial-ish championships with eight counties in each – the necessary rationalisations to be effected by switching the weakest counties around, a bit like the deportation of struggling peasantry in the 19th century.

It was interesting that Tyrone's All-Ireland winning goalkeeper Niall Morgan, one of the players brought along to articulate the membership's view, doubtless reflecting the Ulster attitude to tinkering with the provinces, said at one stage that he was more in favour of the status quo than Option A.

The briefing was one of the first in-person media conferences outside of Croke Park since the pandemic struck all of 18 months ago.

From the top table, chief executive Tom Parsons enthusiastically endorsed the Tailteann Cup and commended his organisation's information video, laid out how Option B would work: provincial championships to operate on a round-robin basis in the spring followed by a league-based championship structure, whittling down the knock-out stages to 10 teams chosen from four divisions, with varying levels of representation from the top to the bottom.

You couldn’t fault the energy of the presentation or the positivity of the players and their personal stories of frustration with being trapped in the inequality of the provincial systems.

The question of the Division One counties who don’t make the knock-out stages, Galway and Roscommon and either Armagh or Monaghan on this year’s model, was well answered by emphasising that league fixtures would all be championship matches and that if you can’t make the top five, you don’t deserve to progress.

It’s possible to accept that as rational while still believing that the counties concerned won’t see it that way when teams from lower divisions are proceeding to knock-out football.

GAA congresses have a history of showcasing the most intense buyer’s remorse since the South Sea bubble.

Another matter touched on at the event was the silence of Croke Park officialdom on the issue. That’s another difference from 2017 when the blueprint for change was driven by Páraic Duffy, then the GAA’s director general, who had devised the proposal.

This is the abiding difficulty for Option B. Its effective patron was former president John Horan, his term now over, who backed the league format. Neither successor Larry McCarthy nor director general Tom Ryan are saying very much on the issue, ostensibly because it's a choice between alternatives, both proposed by a GAA task force.

In recent times, presidents have become more comfortable in taking advocacy positions and McCarthy went as far as to call for the association to be “bold”, which has been interpreted as favouring Option B. But you can’t afford to be that oracular if you want to influence the outcome.

Without high-profile backers, apart from the GPA, the proposal will struggle to get the necessary 60 per cent. This is largely because there’s no shortage of influential figures backing against it. Defence of the provincial championships isn’t all about vested interests or gate receipts

Many in the older generation, which is of course more likely to include decision makers, believe that provincial championships are important because of the tradition and the interest of counties in playing their neighbours – evidenced in the generally higher numbers attending provincial championships matches, compared to qualifiers between the same teams, even though the latter are sudden death.

Financial details haven’t been spelled out and it’s likely that gate receipts would suffer a lot more than they did when the provincial hurling championships switched to a round-robin basis three years ago.

That was for a series of competitive fixtures played at the best time of year whereas, as even the proponents of Option B point out, the provinces are currently hosting the worst mismatches in the football championship.

Overall, Option B is likely to fall short of the 60 per cent target not so much because of its merits but because there are too many loose ends that need to be tied up and after two massively disrupted years, delegates will want more certainty.

smoran@irishtimes.com