The mystery train was a popular concept in Ireland during the middle of the last century. Departing Connolly Station on a Sunday, the excursion to an unknown place attracted people to Amiens Street in anticipation of a pleasant journey with added intrigue concerning where they would actually alight.
The suspense proved unbearable for some and there are accounts of CIE staff being harassed all week to reveal the destination.
We are on the cusp of a football championship, the destination of which is as deep a mystery as it has ever been in recent years or even decades. Even the tracks are unknowable, given the great project that has been the FRC rules overhaul.
Then, there is the landscape through which the railway travels. It has become dull, featureless and overly familiar for half of the provincial campaigns. You could wager a fair wad of cash on an accumulator for Dublin and Kerry to win Leinster and Munster and still not have the price of the train ticket.
This was all very well when the impact extended merely to one-sided matches, run off in jig time, but for the past two years, its influence has undermined the league in a tangle of crossed wires at this time of the year. Even plans next year to guarantee a two-week break may not suffice for managers, who have big matches on the horizon.
There is a key reason why the calendar is struggling to accommodate its three main competitions and that is that they were not built for it. Clear the decks and devise a co-ordinated intercounty competition with decent levels of contest: would it look anything like this?
Provincial championships were organised because it made more sense to have competing teams in reasonable proximity. It suited the GAA’s administrative model of radiating out in concentric circles of influence, club, county, provincial, national.
The rivalries were home-grown and the logistics of travel simpler and by All-Ireland stage there were just four counties, representing Connacht, Leinster, Munster and Ulster.
The national league celebrates its centenary next year. Originally it too was regionalised – for the same reason that the championship was. It took until the turn of the 21st century for the competition to be rationalised into a coherent time-frame.
As recently as 25 years ago, the league meandered from the autumn all the way to spring, typically spanning eight months – to play for the most part seven matches and no more than nine or 10.
The All-Ireland series consisted of three fixtures, not counting replays, which took up the entirety of August and most of September. It made sense to expand it so that the best teams, regardless of province, could meet in the closing stages.
In essence these competitions haven’t changed even if they are now being squeezed into a far smaller calendar footprint of six months.
Four year ago, the GAA had a special congress to ponder the merits of “flipping” the season by bringing provincial championships forward to the spring and using the league as a foundation stone for the All-Ireland series.
One of the principal drivers of the idea was former president John Horan, who proposed it in October 2021. This was in a way the abiding difficulty for Motion 19. Its effective patron was a former president whose term was over.
The committee – cumbersomely titled the Football Calendar Fixtures Review – that he had appointed ended up splitting between this idea and the one that shoehorned the provincial championships into four groups of eight.
In the end the motion got a razor-thin majority but some way adrift of the required 60 per cent. Looking back, its merits are obvious. You move the most flawed competition (the provincials) to the time of year when the weather is least co-operative and link the most successful competition (the league) to the most important, the All-Ireland, at a time of the year when conditions are optimal.
The group format that follows the provincial championships – for one final iteration this year – has been ditched despite arguably being scapegoated for a non-essential protocol, concerning how many teams progressed to the knockout phase.
It has so far provided competitive matches in appealing settings with every team getting a home fixture and also having to travel away to another and play the third in a neutral venue. It was unplugged because of its lack of jeopardy, which entailed playing all those matches, 24, to lose four out of 16 teams.
Yet that could have been tightened to allow just eight rather than 12 to qualify. That was originally avoided because of the threat of dead rubbers. Anyway, what’s done is done for next year.
One of the big obstacles to the flipped season was the understandable commercial interests of the provincial councils. As long as they are used as vehicles for administering games development and other services, they can’t be faulted for hanging on to their most reliable income sources.
The problem is that the football box office is dying in Leinster and Munster and the former doesn’t have the runaway success of a thronged audience for its hurling championship to compensate.
Connacht and Ulster are unhappy enough about the loss of preseason tournament revenues without a threat to confiscate their buoyant championship returns.
In these entwined interests, genuine innovation almost inevitably gets choked.
The all but disowned Towards 150 report in 2018 proposed the abolition of provincial councils and their replacement with regional hubs, which would have responsibility for similar sized populations. In those circumstances, traditional provincial championships could be retained but without any dependency on their gate receipts.
Until there is a root-and-branch reform of governance, football will continue to have attempts at modern structures being twisted around 100-year-old competition formats.
It’s no mystery.
sean.moran@irishtimes.com
