The national football league will seldom command a bigger welcome. With almost perfect symmetry the campaign begins just as restrictions are lifted and crowds permitted to return.
It was the beginning of March nearly two years ago when the guillotine fell. Armagh shoved Fermanagh closer to relegation on March 7th, and then everything stopped. It would be seven months before the competition was concluded.
After two years of improvised league seasons with just one of eight divisional finals actually played – the 2021 Division Three meeting of Derry and Offaly – the competition returns with the football landscape significantly changed.
Look where we were at the end of February 2020. Dublin, having set a new record with the almost fabled five-in-a-row, were under both new management and the microscope.
A definite undercurrent suggested that Kerry would catch them and go one better than the drawn All-Ireland of the previous year. The first league match of 2020 saw the counties meet in another drawn encounter – one of three in the counties' four most recent meetings – and the sense was that the champions would find their challengers very hard to shake off.
In what looks like a straw in the wind from February two years ago but which may equally be a coincidence, Tyrone beat both Kerry and Dublin in what would turn out to be Mickey Harte’s last year in charge. Nonetheless it rings a bell when you look back at those results.
Few could have imagined that by the end of the year Harte would be Louth manager and within little more than 18 months Tyrone would be All-Ireland champions.
Innovations
The opportunity to have a conventional league season is the most striking aspect of what happens this coming weekend, but hidden in plain sight is the huge change that will be introduced this year.
Three massive innovations are about to be trialled in a full season for the first time.
Two years ago the Tailteann Cup for Tier 2 counties had just been introduced at a special congress in October 2019. It was one of the casualties of the pandemic with its introduction held back until this summer.
This year also sees the most ambitious split season yet scheduled: the All-Ireland championship over by the end of July. Two years ago the spilt season was so out of favour with the GAA that its consideration as an option in the report of Fixtures Calendar Review Task Force concluded in forthright rejection.
“Having considered, at some length, the implications of split season scheduling, the task force concluded that it would not be the best solution for the fixture challenges faced by the GAA.”
Now it is due to kick in at the end of July – a championship deadline that when first floated by the Club Players Association at its launch five years ago this month was dismissed as lunacy.
Not alone did the pandemic open everyone’s eyes to the benefits for club players but the swift adoption of the model after the summer of 2020 led to the voluntary disbandment of the CPA last March within more or less a year of the first lockdown on the basis that it had achieved its goal.
New format
Equally historic is the forging this year for the first time of a link between league and championship. There has been so much intense debate about the shape of future football championships that it hasn’t been obvious what’s about to happen this summer.
The new format, passed by Central Council last weekend and almost certainly bound for overwhelming approval at next month’s annual congress – with its round robin combination of both championship- and league-qualified counties – won’t be introduced until 2023.
In the meantime, however, this year’s inaugural Tailteann Cup will also be organised on the basis of league standings at the end of this season.
There remains a little ambiguity in that counties from Division Three and Four can by reaching a provincial final stay in the Sam Maguire but it’s hard to see more than one county achieving that.
Therefore the 16 teams in the lower two divisions won’t for the most part be contesting the All-Ireland series as we have come to understand it.
When the schedule for the year was launched, Feargal McGill, GAA head of games administration, explained that the Tailteann Cup decider couldn’t be played on the same day as the Sam Maguire final this summer.
Although this year is just the start of the Tailteann Cup, the GAA needs to be careful about how it is handled. Back in 2007, congress decided to remove the right of Division Four counties to enter the All-Ireland qualifiers and instead re-routed them to the Tommy Murphy Cup.
As usual, the original decision was taken blithely and repented at leisure, with many of the affected counties kicking up blue murder as soon as the implications set in.
Fair wind
At the moment the Tailteann Cup has a fair wind as part of the proposed new championship format but if it happens that the teams involved – and almost inevitably it mightn’t dawn on them immediately – sense that they are being treated dismissively, that wind won’t be long dropping and with every danger that it will leave the Tier 2 championship becalmed.
It mightn't be immediately obvious why counties are so keen to go on a double bill with the Sam Maguire finalists like overgrown minors but that desire is undoubtedly there and echoed only this week by Tipperary manager David Power. It would be a symbol that it's being taken seriously - unlike its Tier 2 predecessors in the minds of many.
The GAA will need to tread carefully and show that this time they mean it.
e: smoran@irishtimes.com
