Tommy Lyons can chuckle about it now but his highly publicised health scare at the weekend was a jittery enough experience for all concerned. Media at least have speedy access to accurate information but in the city at large rumour begat ever more fantastic rumour.

In the pubs on Sunday night it was possible to pick an electrical frisson that Tommy Lyons, Dublin football manager, had died suddenly. Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny is said to have been informed by the Taoiseach on arrival at Croke Park that Lyons had had a heart attack.

Even for those with the correct information it was of macabre interest to hear the various theories behind the Dublin manager's sudden ailment: that he had been under enormous pressure fronting the county's return to the big time and juggling that with business and family commitments; that even for someone as ebullient and well organised it had all been, well, too much.

We now know that the spectre of coronary illness was unsubstantiated but on Monday in Croke Park and elsewhere in Dublin it had been all too plausible.

So even the revised circumstances raise questions about the sheer pressure of life at the elite level of the GAA. There is an "olde worlde" romanticism about amateurism - or the "amateur ethos" as it's frequently known - but whatever about the romance of sport in general and indigenous sport in particular there's little olde worlde about life in the intercounty fast lane.

State-of-the-art stadium, bumper crowds and a sharpening commercial sense are familiar from global sport but they are not natural incidents of amateurism in the accepted sense of sport played purely for the love of participation.

It's been often said that nothing separates GAA players from professionals in terms of preparation. This is true, as the ability to do nothing but rest for periods of the day is one of the most important aspects of professional athletes' schedules.

Management teams don't have the same physical demands obviously but their task is even more time consuming and in many ways more stressful.

One former intercounty manager said that the unending meetings - team discussions, management analysis, sorting out individual problems and so on - were enormously intrusive before you even consider training sessions. Another made the point that he never fully switched off mentally.

For all involved life goes by in a blur. Work during the day and often beyond, family commitments, training four times a week all eat up time and leave nothing for rest.

The sense of achievement is fine, medals are wonderful but the demands go far beyond the recreational diversion of amateur sport. Elite sport may be amateur in the sense that players are not paid - though largely it isn't - but it is not recreation. What on earth is recreational about having your life disrupted and your family disappointed?

Paul Caffrey on Monday had to face his wife and children in the knowledge that their family holiday scheduled to start yesterday morning was now endangered by Dublin's replay date with Donegal. In the event they left for Spain without him.

THEY don't complain about this. It is accepted as part of the sacrifice to be made for involvement at this level and it happens all around the country. But is it fair?

The argument often comes back that as soon as people start getting paid, the genuine volunteer will be off, disgusted by the taint of lucre to the extent that he will have no more to do with the GAA.

There is an inverse argument that the same volunteer is happy to use his sale of a few raffle tickets as a lever against the people whose gargantuan contributions are a major part of the association's chief source of revenue.

It is a dog-in-the-manger attitude rather than anything more principled. Every sport divides between those who do it for fun and those who do it for different reasons at a far more intense level. The GAA is no different - except that the input of the latter group is not recognised financially.

Without doing an audit on the funding of professionalism it is clear that the public appetite for matches has not been adequately catered for in the past. The introduction of varied championship structures in both hurling and football has created more big days, larger crowds and increased revenue - and increased demands on players and managements.

For the most part teams are glad of this as they train to play rather than vice versa but it does take up more and more time at the top level. There has to be a trade-off. More matches mean greater revenue and promotion of the games. They should also mean that players aren't forbidden to earn money from that additional activity.

On a related point there is evidence that far from being penalised by extra matches, teams actually do better with regular competition. The focus on the weekend's qualifiers indicates that provincial champions are not faring well in the new championship.

Last year none of the provincial champions won their quarter-finals at the first time of asking. This time around only Cork managed to - and they have had the most arduous campaign of any of their peers, having had to replay both the Munster semi-final and final.

The clear message is that ring-rustiness is setting in between the provincial final and All-Ireland quarter-finals stage. But it also illustrates the extent to which additional matches are good for teams. The more matches a team plays the better the chance it has of finding a consistent rhythm. So an expanded championship format suits everyone.

The size of the attendances at Croke Park this summer shouldn't blind us to the fact that a rational programme of matches - a championship based on a league format - would draw additional but more modest attendances. Not all fixtures have the 70,000 potential but an awful lot would stretch to 20,000.

Things don't evolve in a flash within the GAA but the day is coming when we will have such a competitive structure and those whose efforts bring it about will be materially recognised.