Disastrous decision made on club football format

By Kevin Egan

References to events at Offaly GAA County Board meetings have been few and far between in the Offaly Independent this year, and for good reason. By and large, Offaly GAA is a very well-run organisation at the moment, and while there will always be controversies, they tend to be handled diplomatically and democratically, as a general rule.

On Tuesday night, however, a decision by the Offaly county board to revamp the county’s senior football championships has been all over the national conversation this week. And the overwhelming consensus is that the clubs of the county have voted through an incredibly ill-thought-out measure that is almost certain to be reversed again next year, when the practicalities of the move come to bear.

In 2023, the county’s flagship adult competitions saw participating clubs split into groups of four, with the top team going into the semi-finals, second and third going into quarter-finals, and the bottom team entering a relegation final. For those that are unaware, the change voted through for 2024 will see every team will come out of the group and play a quarter-final.

Placings in the round robin stage will only determine who plays who in the quarter-finals, and it will be possible for a team to lose all three games and still win their championship, just as it will be possible for a team to win all three group games, and still get relegated.

The logic behind the move is to give clubs an extra meaningful game. The problem is that while every club will now play at least two meaningful games in the knockout stages, it reduces the group games to a series of challenge matches.

Strong teams won’t want to show their hand against each other; there will be instances in the final round of games where it may be beneficial for a club to lose a game; and there’s absolutely no danger of management teams pulling from their second teams to try and win group games if they have an injury or two.

In addition, younger players can book their flights to America for the summer in the secure knowledge that they will be back for the important games, and supporters will have little or no interest in attending fixtures they know to be inconsequential.

Historical precedent

Perhaps the most disappointing aspect of this is that we’ve been here before. The Offaly senior hurling championship, in a bid to replicate the structure in Kilkenny, decided in the late noughties to go to two groups of six with every team getting a knockout game at the end. That was until Tullamore upset everyone by failing to win a group game and still coming away with the big prize in 2009.

Kevin Martin, who managed his native club that year, made no secret of the fact that they made the decision to treat the round robin games as learning experiences rather than cut and thrust championship matches, since they knew there was little or no incentive to do otherwise.

As soon as this happened, Offaly clubs voted to change the system and revert to a structure where the top four clubs got into a quarter-final, so you had to finish outside the bottom two.

The lesson that was learned back then, even if it has clearly been forgotten in the meantime, is that a fixture can take place as part of a championship, but unless it really matters who wins and who loses, it won’t be championship football or championship hurling as we know and love it. There is no championship structure in the country where it is possible to have half a dozen or so games and for them all to be meaningful – the closest there is to that anywhere is probably the system in Westmeath football of a strong group of six clubs with four qualifiers, and a weak group of six with two qualifiers, and then a relegation final.

No doubt that will be one of the structures discussed this time next year, when the clubs of Offaly go back to the drawing board after realising the disastrous mess they made with their votes last Tuesday.

Changes to underage

The other significant decision taken at Tuesday’s county board meeting was the call to revert to even age grades – U-14, U-16, and U-18 for minor – starting in 2025. The pendulum is swinging back this way nationally, as more and more clubs find that players in their 18th year opt not to play adult games, and in many cases are lost to the club forever.

Crucially, decoupling will remain. This means that a player is eligible for adult games, or minor, but not both.

Very small clubs that are under pressure to field teams for demographic reasons tend to argue against this clause, saying that they need players in that year to make up their panel, while there are others who look at the exploits of players like Adam Screeney and Brecon Kavanagh this year, or even the trio of Harry Plunkett, Cormac Egan and John Furlong with Tullamore in 2021, and point out that players of that age are quite often well able for adult games, and who don’t need to be held back.

Of course, it is possible for both these things to be true, while at the same time, for the decision to maintain decoupling to be correct.

After all, the legal voting age is 18, even though there are several 16 and 17 year-olds who are far more civically and politically aware than the majority of adults. There is a legal age at which one can get a driving licence, where one can be in a licensed premises at night time, and when a person can choose to get married. For all of these things, much as it’s the case with Gaelic football and hurling, it’s not that there is a magic transformation on the day of someone’s birthday, but that a line has to be drawn somewhere to legislate for the greater good.

First and foremost, in a dual county, it’s not realistic to create a system where one player could have a full season of football and hurling at both adult and minor level, without putting excess strain on that player. Absolutely, players have done it in the past, many of them successfully – but the amount of running players put up in games now is higher than ever. Club players are stronger and more powerful than ever, so the hits are harder, the energy expended is greater, and each game takes a heavier toll.

Secondly, it is impossible to create a system in a dual county where a single player could be eligible for four teams, and for each of those four teams to have a full and robust games programme, without that player being pushed far beyond the limit.

There are ways of dealing with the issue of really small clubs struggling to put teams on the field, perhaps through creative use of the transfer system, and there are ways of making sure that 18-year-old players get enough good games to continue their development.

On a night when the clubs of Offaly made what is almost certainly going to prove to be a foolish decision with regard to the adult football championships in the county, their decision to hold firm on decoupling looks like a good, responsible call.