Ideas needed to inject life into club football scene

By Kevin Egan

Even allowing for the first round of games offering a few more storylines than might have been expected, it’s still hard to get excited about the second round of the Offaly adult football championship ties this weekend.

Edenderry and Shamrocks went into their game last night (Friday) on a high, with Shamrocks going on to claim a narrow win, 1-9 to 0-11. On the flip side, both Ferbane and Durrow will crave redemption on Saturday evening in the live Clubber TV game. And for those of us who grew up in the west Offaly area, there will always be something appealing about a championship game between Doon and Shannonbridge, regardless of the grade.

However there’s no putting lipstick on the pig in the sense that these are not championship games in any real way. It’s not 'championship' when a team would prefer to put in an impressive performance in a high quality game and lose by one or two points, than to scrape a narrow win in a bad game due to a few strokes of luck here and there. Offaly GAA has recognised this, and for the next two weeks, clubs will be allowed to submit proposals to the county board for consideration.

With this in mind, one wonders if it isn’t time to think differently. We’ve spoken before about how just three clubs have competed in the last six county finals, and five clubs in the last 16. To put that in context, the equivalent numbers in Laois are six clubs in the last six years, and 12 in the last 16; in Westmeath, six and seven; in Kildare, six and eight; in Longford, eight and nine; and in Meath, five and 12. So all around Offaly, there is much more variation in who tend to be the leading clubs at any one time.

A peculiar thing is that Offaly football appears to have suffered greatly from the creation of an elite top tier in the National Football League. The advent of a Division One of eight teams has not helped any mid-tier county like Offaly, and the old-fashioned 1A/1B/2A/2B system was much more egalitarian.

Yet here in Offaly, just eight teams compete for the Dowling Cup. Now, if that was to increase to ten, or even 12, would those extra teams be championship contenders? Absolutely not, but there’s no doubt that Offaly football is not well served by having historically strong clubs like Clara and Gracefield spending so much time out of the top tier, not getting games against the best teams. Right now, they don’t deserve to be in the top eight, they’re outside of that bracket on merit, but it doesn’t serve Offaly well for that to be the case.

So instead, why not move back up to 12, to give more teams exposure to the top level? Initially, people would assume that meant either two teams of six, possibly with a weak group – which would completely defeat the purpose – or three fours. But how about, instead, Offaly were to run an open draw for each of four rounds, with the only proviso that in rounds two, three and four, you cannot meet a club that you have met previously in the competition.

It could be the case that rounds one and two are drawn and fixed with three or four weeks’ notice so clubs can prepare for their home and away games, and then to heighten tension, round three is drawn after round two is played, and round four after round three.

If there were 12 senior teams, it could be that the top eight teams on a league basis play quarter-finals, with the top four getting home advantage. If it was ten, then it could perhaps be top two into the semi-finals, with third through sixth playing two quarter-finals, and either way, a relegation final between the bottom two teams. But crucially, it makes it much less likely that any team would have nothing to play for in round four, and it also introduces the possibility of a ‘handy’ draw, or a fiendishly difficult one, which would add intrigue and interest.

Ballycommon’s excellent performance against Tullamore in round one is the perfect example of how a club that is unused to that level of football can step up if the conditions are there to allow them to excel. There are drawbacks in terms of Offaly sending “lower-ranked” teams into the Leinster club championships, but this county’s primary concern always should be the local domestic competitions, and they clearly need an injection of something, from somewhere.