More teams are jumping on spring school bandwagon

ON GAELIC GAMES:If nothing else at least the start of the league takes the spotlight off such dispiriting contemplations as corrupt payments and violent indiscipline

THE BEST thing about the league, which gets the football season under way this weekend, is that since it was organised on a calendar-year basis it has developed a definite link to championship achievement.

Whereas in the past it was noted chiefly for some dazzlingly false dawns, in the past 10 years or so it has nearly always engaged the close attention of the best teams.

All-Ireland champions Dublin are just the latest graduates of the spring school. After years of struggle and moving between Divisions One and Two, the county got serious about the league and has lost just twice in regulation matches since 2009. Predecessors Cork have won league titles for the past three years (one Division Two and two Division One) and in the middle of that sequence clinched a first All-Ireland in 20 years.

The counties that dominated the championship for most of the past decade, Tyrone and Kerry, are also convincing witnesses to the new reality. Kerry in particular have been a model of consistency in the league in an era when they were also qualifying for six successive All-Ireland finals or seven in eight years.

Since Jack O’Connor began his first stint as manager in the 2004 season, the county has rattled off three league wins, one runners-up finish, come third in the table – missing the play-offs by one position – on three occasions and only once falling outside that ultra-competitive category in 2010 when coincidentally or not they had their worst championship in the modern era – losing an All-Ireland quarter-final for the first time.

Tyrone were the first to make the connection since the qualifier system was introduced into the championship at the same time as the calendar-year season and they won back-to-back leagues prior to lifting the county’s first Sam Maguire in 2003.

Although Mickey Harte’s team would win two further All-Irelands the graph of their league success can be seen as incrementally downwards with the two successes of 2002 and ’03 followed by two years of reaching the semi-finals, a season coming third and a season coming fourth prior to finishing fifth in the next two campaigns and then getting relegated.

With loss of league status has come waning championship performance.

The only year with no evident follow-on between league and championship progress was 2007 when Donegal defeated Mayo but neither reached the All-Ireland quarter-finals.

More recently Donegal and Down vindicated their league-based credentials by following up promotion and in the former case a divisional title with championship runs that took them within a score of the eventual All-Ireland winners. Down didn’t build on that last year and will need to if 2010 isn’t to become an anomaly.

Similarly Donegal, with their now all-too-familiar style, must step up to the top flight and preserve if not enhance their new status. The most obvious pressure for the campaign could be said to rest on Kildare. Kieran McGeeney could retort that his team have been serious contenders without doing well in the league but evidence suggests that they would be well advised to prioritise getting out of Division Two.

The counties that eliminated Kildare from the past two championships have been Donegal and Down, both at the time on the way back to Division One and with the momentum that entailed. Curiously both of the most recent All-Ireland winners Dublin and Cork were among their predecessors as promoted teams in the four years since the reintroduction of hierarchical Divisions One and Two.

It doesn’t work for everyone and the other teams promoted in those years, 2008-11, Westmeath, Monaghan, Armagh and Laois didn’t go on to make much of a championship impact.

Mayo are actually the most consistent league county – the only one to have been in Division One every year since the calendar year and qualifiers have been in force. Whether you view that as an exception is a matter of opinion. Although the All-Irelands of 2004 and ’06 didn’t end well for the county, Mayo is one of only five to have contested more than one All-Ireland during the period under review.

Whereas there has been some advocacy for the scrapping of the calendar year, most managers appear to prefer the clearer demarcation of season and close season (or maybe more accurately, pre-season) as well as the intensity of a fast sequence of regular matches even with the vulnerability to injury that arises.

The advent of floodlit matches has allowed players a scattering of free Sundays as well as providing the GAA with a better promotional spread of matches. It has also made rescheduling weather-affected fixtures more flexible.

Yet there are no guarantees of a competition going from strength to strength. Dublin’s successful Spring Series last year and the average attendance of 30,000 at their Croke Park matches and the hope that this can be emulated over the coming two months have been predicated on the county’s best couple of years since the middle of the last decade.

How practical would the promotion have been had Dublin occupied the sort of place in football they were in even four years ago, hovering between underwhelming league campaigns and perennial championship disappointment?

There were sharp intakes of breath when Dublin’s strategic plan, launched last autumn, targeted winning an All-Ireland every three years and yet that’s the sort of strike rate that would probably be necessary to maintain big attendances for league matches in Croke Park.

For other less populous counties, attendances are always going to be more modest and we also await with interest the emerging evidence as to whether the league’s relatively new status as apparently indispensable to a team’s realistic championship credentials is based on a true chain of consequences – as opposed to the strategies of specific counties.

Finally it might lack the box-office sensations of summer but the start of the league at least returns the games to centre-stage and takes the spotlight off such dispiriting contemplations as corrupt payments and violent indiscipline.