National Leagues need to be revamped

WITH ACTIVITY in the National Leagues due to restart soon it may be time to take a look at the whole league set up. While the championship will always attract more spectators and more media attention it must never be forgotten that the National Leagues play a very important role in the life of the GAA and that interest must be encouraged if the games are to survive. Let us concentrate for the moment on football.

The situation as it stands at present is that many different approaches to the league are adopted by some counties. In a few cases counties will practically ignore the competition, wishing to give players a break and have them refreshed for the championship.

Others may use the league to try out new players, examine new approaches and keep people reasonably fit.

Others at the lower ends, of the league tables will try to earn promotion while some counties may hope to earn some money for the county board so that emphasis can later be put on preparing their championship team.

Many of these considerations do not take account of the attitudes of the people who pay at the gate and that is a dangerous road to follow because many will not bother to turn up if they believe that the players out on the pitch are not giving their full attention to the task in hand winning matches.

For this reason a critical look at the National League structure may be overdue. Certainly the opening stages this year have generated very little interest. This may have been a reaction to the excitement which this year's football and hurling championships evoked.

The victories of Clare in hurling and Dublin in football were just what the GAA needed and people may have been a little over wrought by the time the leagues started and interest was at a low ebb.

It may be time again to try the experiment which the GAA indulged in a few years ago. A four section seeded draw was made which threw up quite a number of intriguing clashes, some of them unique in fact, and the National League did not lose any of its status.

The system was based on the standing which teams had earned for themselves in the previous season. The eight teams in each section were made up of the top two in each of the previous year's divisions and so on down. The experiment worked well. Its only, fault was that there was no promotion or relegation but the two top teams in each section qualified for the quarter finals and the National League - was in no way diminished.

In fact the system which was used was a kind of a blueprint for an open draw which some of us have been advocating for the All Ireland championship for some years now.

Perhaps it is time to re introduce the system outlined above for the National Football League for next season. If there were to be an announcement to that effect straight away it might inject an extra bit of bite into the rest of this season's league.

And talking about bite. I'm afraid that the Railway Cup competitions have completely lost any bite they had. There was a time when the announcement of teams and the matches were the talk of the country and fuelled many a debate about the relative merits of this player or that.

I still have vivid recollections of a semi final in Markievicz Park between Connacht and Ulster with some of the greatest players ever to grace a pitch in action.

A Connacht half forward line of Mattie McDonagh, Sean Purcell and Pakie McGarty with Frank Stockwell at full forward and Nace O'Dowd at fullback. An Ulster team with Thady Turbett in goal and men like Jim McKeever, Joe Lennon Jody O'Neill, Paddy Doherty and Jimmy Whan. Even allowing for the rose tinted spectacles of youth one can't help feeling that the teams of today do not match up to those of yesteryear, although an Ulster full forward line of Mickey Linden, Peter Canavan and Tony Boyle comes quite close.

The time seems right to drop these fixtures altogether. Neither the public nor the players are really interested. Sunshine holidays are now in vogue and the fact that the Leinster team does not contain a single member of the All Ireland winning Dublin team speaks volumes.

The All Ireland medallists might catch a glimpse of the match between Leinster and Connacht if the pilot of their plane could be coaxed to do a detour over Navan on the way in from San Diego. The Railway Cups served, the games well. A dignified death would be much preferable to a lingering demise.

By and large the GAA calendar is very much overcrowded nowadays and it is difficult to suggest ways of avoiding the problems which arise. What is very important, however, is the preservation of the National Leagues as, a vital part of the games. An inspired revamp would certainly go a long way to reviving flagging interest.