It will come as no surprise to you that the attendances at Croke Park at the weekend were piss-poor.
27,615 turned up to Croke Park on Saturday, with just 29,215 filing through turnstiles for the All -Ireland quarter-finals on Sunday: were the GAA to play the games as a quadruple-header, they would still have had 25,470 empty seats.
This is a trend in general: championship attendances are down across the board. Pauric Duffy put this down to a couple of specific factors and one general reason: Dublin's dominance of Leinster along with the failure of Cork to qualify for the Munster final were cited alongside the scheduling of Euro 2016.
Many of our readers read between the lines of Duffy's statement and claimed he was evading the true reason: the fact that the quality of the product isn't worth paying for to the casual sports fan. This isn't exactly a revolutionary idea, it's pretty much all we are being told.
First off: some games have been really poor. Jorge Valdano would apologise to Jose Mourinho for his "shit on a stick" quote had he watched the second half of the drawn Connacht final, and Dublin have left the Leinster football Championship increasingly resembles a modernist riff on the futility of life.
Also, the structure is patently bananas.
Compare Kerry's route to an All-Ireland final (Clare, Tipperary, Clare, Donegal/Dublin) with Donegal's:
If Donegal are to win Sam they'll have to beat (most likely) the champions from
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15 pic.twitter.com/JkShtiqs0A— UnOfficialGaa (@UnOfficialGaa) July 29, 2016
A better structure has consistently been viewed as a panacea to the games' current ills, and while it would fix a lot of issues - a competition in which sides play the same number of games would be a fairly good start - there is no reason why the narrative surrounding the sport should be as negative as it is, even allowing for a competition whose structure is more absurd than some of those designed by Salvador Dali.
There is plenty to enjoy within the championship as it is, and this writer is of the opinion that much of the negativity stems from how the competition is presented to us on television.
There are a number of smaller issues that I'll get to, but the main issue is one of expectation.
The Championship is a cup competition which functions as its sports' blue-chip event, drawing a comparison with the World Cup and European Championship. Aside from the 2014 World Cup (and even then, the goals dried up in the knockout stages) no major tournament since 2002 can be termed entertaining in the traditional football sense.
Instead they are compelling: tense affairs between top-level nations and major upsets are the main selling points of major tournaments in the absence of the kind of free-flowing, more careless approach taken in domestic leagues.
But these competitions take up a month every two years, so any idea that the standard of football and tactics employed in these tournaments is indicative of a wider change in approach in the sport is swiftly defeated a couple of months into a new league season. The idea that the sole purpose of a major football tournament was to showcase flair and ability, rather than win was destroyed at Italia '90.
Given the sheer scope of alternative football on offer, it is easy to see dour performances and defensive tactics at major tournaments as nothing other than functional, rather than symptomatic.
The issue with the Championship is the same problem magnified and multiplied: the competition in question is longer and more regular, and the alternative competitions exposed in the national media are far fewer.
The Championship is the only Gaelic football competition broadcast live and in English on Irish television, so to the casual sports fan, the competition in which functionality is best seems to be the only one on offer. There are some glorious games in the National League, along with club games and under-21 games, hidden away on TG4.
Yet these are largely ignored by RTE, so the functionality of the Championship appears to many as the only means, rather than a means to an end.
That is the wider issue of emphasis, and the idea that the quality of football is somehow declining is not a new one. Here is Pat Spillane speaking in 1992, words that are mocked by their 2016 echo:
For what now seems like aeons, analysts and pundits have complained about the spectacle of the game, denouncing the loss of the basic skills of the game as they castigate managers for "negative tactics", men who appear to have the lousy temerity of attempting to give themselves the best chance of winning a game.
This has become an obsession in TV studios today, with analysts firstly asked whether they enjoyed a game rather than analysing it, as if they are distrustful of the viewer's ability to realise if he/she was being entertained. Even Ciaran Whelan - one of the best analysts RTE have - felt obliged to force in an "I thought it was a great game" ahead of his reaction to the Tipperary/Galway on RTE's live broadcast last weekend.
This has become quite condescending to the viewer, as low-scoring games are dismissed as being ruined by "defensive" or "negative" tactics, with little further discussion on the nuances of those tactics.
Pre-game formation graphics are terribly outmoded: players are still identified in the traditional, two lines of three either side of two midfielders, which offers the viewer no real concept of exactly how teams will set up. Were graphics updated to reflect exactly how a team lined up - as they do in football - the game would be far more intriguing to the casual viewer, and would not be purely reliant on free-flowing, high-scoring games for entertainment.
Another issue is the game selection. RTE have managed to fail to broadcast virtually all of the entertaining games - in the traditional sense - this year. Other than perhaps Tipperary and Galway, the best games of this year's Championship have come in the qualifiers: Longford's games with Down and Monaghan and Tipperary's dramatic win over Derry were spectacular contests, yet the latter was the only one broadcast on live television, and even that was hidden behind Sky Sports' paywall.
The GAA's television deal is around €10 million, so for being forced to wait until Sunday night for a four-minute highlights package of a Saturday afternoon throw-in is absurd. The entertainment is there, but increasingly, RTE are looking in all the wrong places.
While a certain amount of this game selection is luck, RTE unfailingly manage to broadcast Leinster Championship games involving Dublin and the latest county who have been shoved to the top of the queue for sacrifice, with the ever-dwindling crowd fully aware that the contest is over before it began.
While the resolution to this has traditionally been to change the Championship structure, it may be about time for broadcasters to make the move first, and further accentuate the novel pairings thrown up in the qualifiers.
Sky are not guiltless here either. Their package has allowed them to show many more football qualifiers than RTE, yet these games were hidden away from many viewers: a natural result of hiding them behind pay TV. As a result, Sky's viewing figures have been poor, yet more could be done to salvage them. Perhaps this is a rights issue that may yet be resolved, but Diarmuid O'Connor scored one of the finest individual goals in years against Kildare, yet a clip of the goal was not tweeted out from Sky's account.
Compare that to Eir Sport's coverage of Dundalk's victory over BATE Borisov last night: their account tweeted a clip of each goal within minutes of it being scored.
There have been lots of terrible games in this year's Championship, many as a result of mismatches stemming from a lopsided structure. Yet the magic is there, and all we need is for someone to tell us to look in the right direction.
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