It's leagues apart when it comes to progression

This year's football championship shows how Division One teams are ruling the roost, writes SEAN MORAN

SINCE THE All-Ireland qualifier format was introduced 11 years ago, the growing correlation between doing well in the league and success in the championship has become well established so it’s probably no surprise that should the bookies’ odds play out, there will be just one top division side missing from next weekend’s All-Ireland quarter-finals.

Tyrone, promoted to Division One this spring, made their exit last Saturday but Kerry, who beat them, are also a top-flight county.

The only one of today’s fixtures that will definitely buck that trend is that of Laois and Meath, who will campaign in Divisions Three and Two respectively next season.

Should the other matches deliver the expected outcomes, it will be the highest representation of elite counties among the final eight of the championship because previous highs of seven and on three other occasions, eight teams all took place before the NFL moved to a hierarchical four-division structure for the 2008 season.

Meath and Laois not alone won’t play Division One next year but both were relegated this season, as were Tipperary, who are enjoying their best run in the qualifiers to date.

Does this suggest that somewhere beneath the statistics indicating a definite trend towards elitism, a peculiar sub-dynamic exists? Laois manager Justin McNulty is on record as saying that even a doomed campaign in Division One has its redeeming features.

“For the players to have had some of the defeats that they’ve experienced, and then go and still be hugely competitive,” he said before the match that relegated his team, “that’s a testament to the character of the players. That’s something that we can grow into and that will help us with the battles and the challenges ahead.”

His counterpart this afternoon, Séamus McEnaney had set his sights higher than that at the start of the season, declaring after a second successive win at the start of the league that remaining in Division Two was “the first target of 2012”.

Meath didn’t win another point after that and after relegation McEnaney lost a vote of confidence by the county board but not by a necessary two-thirds majority.

There is an argument that from such a nadir the only way was up and championship performances have supported the contention. Tipperary, who dispensed with their manager, bounced back immediately.

Maurice Horan is the only manager to take a Division Four team to the All-Ireland quarter-finals, when his Limerick side, who had been relegated that spring, lost to Kerry last year. They nearly caused the shock of the football season seven days ago when coming within seconds of defeating Kildare.

Limerick didn’t achieve promotion this year either. Horan believes that the “Division Four” label has helped in reducing expectations and allowing the team some camouflage.

“Being practical, Limerick could do with being a couple of divisions higher – bigger crowds, better challenges – but we beat the Division Three champions and almost beat the Division Two champions so you can’t solely base it on that.”

Limerick, ironically, never managed to make the qualifiers work as well for them in the years when they were in Division One (the old, 16-team version). Making a major impact on the Munster championship – the short turnaround between provincial final defeats and the next match proved non-negotiable in 2003 and ’04.

Although success in Division One carries status, doing well in the other divisions doesn’t come with the same guarantees. The promoted teams in divisions two to four – Wicklow, Fermanagh, Longford, Wexford, Tyrone and Kildare – all had disappointing championships and only Kildare are still in the qualifiers.

Horan isn’t too surprised by this. “Lots of teams put a major emphasis on the league and it often burns them out. Getting promoted is fiercely competitive and draining. You’re driving all over the county having to win all of the time because of the pressure to stay at the top of the division. It has to take something out of teams.”

Today’s outcomes will be interesting. In 2008, ’09 and ’10 there were just four counties from Division One in the All-Ireland quarter-finals. Last year it went up to five and 2012 may deliver seven. Maybe it’s a random deviation rather than a trend towards stricter hierarchies within the game but today will tell.