This year's GAA Congress might have been the most contentious in the contentious history of the event. There was a lot of mud slinging and conspiracy theories aplenty, and ultimately, we came out of it with a restructured All-Ireland Football Championship, incorporating the "Super 8" competition in the calendar from 2018.
While the main focus of dispute was on the voice of the club player, and the decision by the GAA to shut out that voice, a momentum (very slowly) gathered among people involved in the game of hurling that a massive extension of the Football Championship might not be in the best interest of their game.
A lot of this debate came far too late however, and the Super 8 motion passed quite easily in the end.
Since then though, hurling people, realising that in the last two months of the GAA season, the sport will feature five games versus football's 19, have been on the offensive about where this leaves the game.
Surely a chronic imbalance in July/Aug 2018 . 19 football games 5 hurling . How are we going to show off our sport fairly .might call it GFA
— Anthony Daly (@DaloAnto) February 26, 2017
Ger Loughnane says hurling people don't realise the new threat to their sport's profile. Definitely right about that https://t.co/8vnlqWMFMz
— Balls.ie (@ballsdotie) March 2, 2017
Belatedly, GAA Director General Paraic Duffy, who originally didn't seem to feel to need to even admit the "Super 8" idea would affect hurling, spoke of the Association's determination to not let hurling be "dwarfed" and that they would be "very open" to look at hurling championship changes.
The prevailing opinion put forth by football people in favour of the Super 8, is that hurling people don't want their championship messed with. That may be true in some ways, but it's certainly not an absolute consensus. 2014 Hurler of the Year Richie Hogan told Newstalk back in 2015 that he "hates" the Championship structure. This was largely ignored.
Now, another Hurler of the Year, Clare's Tony Kelly, has come out even stronger on the subject, claiming that even the Munster Championship, so often seen as "sacrosanct" to hurling, may have to be sacrificed for the good of the game.
Speaking ahead of the AIB All-Ireland Club Hurling Final between his club Ballyea and Dublin's Cuala on St. Patrick's Day, Kelly was asked if he would be willing to lose the Munster Championship.
Personally, I would.
And I can understand why it isn’t. I can understand why winning a Munster championship would be a massive thing for us because of the competition that’s there. But if you were comparing it to Dublin winning the Leinster championship in football....from my looking in from the outside, I don’t think it’s their goal.
In Munster, of all the hurling teams, I don’t think it’s their overall goal either. It’s a massive achievement to win it but their overall goal is to get to Croke Park and to win the All-Ireland.
So I wouldn’t have an objection if they did get rid of the Munster championship and had an all-out proper All-Ireland series ran off, with everyone in it.
Kelly would support such a radical change in the hurling championship because of where hurling has been left by the introduction of football's Super 8. He joined the chorus of objections to the "imbalance" created by GAA Congress a couple of weeks ago.
It’s definitely an imbalance. I hear of lot of lads giving out about the ‘Super 8’ in the football but if something like that was to come into the hurling, I’d be a fan of it.
I think something like that in hurling would give better games as well. Even last year — I heard Henry Shefflin and ‘Dalo’ saying it on TV — that there were three good semi-finals and a final really.
And I think the final wasn’t even as good as the three semi-finals. But if you had that sort of format in July and August and big hurling games like that, it would bring on hurling in leaps and bounds.
We don’t have as many hurling teams as they do in football but I think something like that would really benefit hurling.
I am a fan of bringing the All-Ireland finals forward to August but I also wouldn’t see a problem with moving them back to September if there was something like a ‘Super 8’ or a ‘Super 10’, or whatever brought into the hurling.
If you look at Division 1A in hurling right now and how tight it is, if you had something like that in the middle of the championship, I think it would be a really good championship.
It's hard to see such a radical change as getting rid of the Munster Championship in the next few years, but it's now clear there now is the consensus for change that football people said didn't exist. It will be interesting to see how the GAA react to this unrest and if as much of an effort will go into maximising the Hurling Championship as they put in for football this time.
[Irish Examiner]
