What is the point of being in Division One if it’s just about staying in Division One?
After Monaghan’s brilliant win over Tyrone on Saturday night, man of the match Fintan Kelly spoke with eir Sport. Now, remember, this is a county who had just gone and won three of their four games in the top flight, they’re in third place in the table and they’ve already scalped big guns like Tyrone and Kerry.
But Kelly didn’t really look at it for what it was. The results or the hard-fought performances or the opportunity to actually contest for a league title didn’t seem to rank as highly to the Farney defender as just being there for another season.
“Six points,” he reflected after the one-point win over Tyrone. “It’s great that we can focus on the summer…”
The win means that Monaghan are all but safe from relegation but it begs the question that, if that’s the only goal, why does it matter being there in the first place? Why do they care about being in Division One for 2019 if it just means they’ll try to be there again the season after that?
Everyone dreams of getting to Division One and then, when they’re there, they just want to be in a position where they don’t have to give a toss about Division One as soon as they can.
Teams like Roscommon bust their holes, sold this dream that, when they make it to the top table, they’ll have reached the promised land. Roscommon succeeded and, not only that, they pushed on in their first season in Division One and reached the league semi-final. Then they were told they peaked too soon and that other counties weren’t at the same level at that time of year and their bad championship was put down to a good league campaign. They got relegated the next season and won Connacht. They’ve become a cautionary tale for teams targeting the league.
On The GAA Hour this week, the same sort of thing was peddled. Mayo are now in the bottom two of Division One but it’s said that, as long as they can stay up, they’ll be happy enough. But, really though, why the hell does it matter if they stay up or not? They don’t play their full team, they don’t ‘target’ the league and, irrespective of whether or not they get relegated, they’ll be judged on the championship.
The idea that teams need to get to the top tier so they can get experience against the best teams is flawed if the best teams are not playing their best teams and the best teams are saving their best for the summer. And any of those new sides – like Galway – going at it too hard will have a question mark over their heads even when they’re winning because every piece of analysis finishes up with the three most annoying words in these games: it’s only February.
Well, guess what, it’s only February and an awful lot of counties only have five games left in their entire seasons.
And, actually, it’s the media’s fault as much as it is the GAA culture’s. Because the whole programme is designed around championship, so too are the sport programmes. They, too, all fall into the trap of not getting too excited. Build-up to games are non-existent and the fallout of matches are just the same exercises of caution because it’s too early to say anything.
As much stick as Sky Sports get, imagine if they had the national league to play with. There’d be so much stats and unearthed significance to every game you wouldn’t know what to do with it. There’d be interviews every day on Sky Sports News. They’d be pumping up fixtures all week, some of them would have their own bill – Derby Day, First Blood, Undefeated – and there’d be a bloody countdown clock until the games threw in.
You might scoff at that and dismiss it because it’s only February and it’s only the league but the only reason nobody cares about it is because nobody makes them care about it. The league isn’t treated like a big competition by the media and by a lot of teams and, because of that, when Dublin actually get eight games against the best sides in the country, there’s not one sinner allowed to read anything into it.
21,000 people sat in Croke Park and watched Dublin and Donegal play out an end to end classic under lights. Two of the best sides in one of the greatest stadiums on earth going at it in the sort of game modern day football has been whinging about and there’s not a peep before or for much longer after. There were over 60,000 empty seats.
If we stopped dismissing this competition and actually bought into it, realised that the vast majority of games in the season will take place in the league – even if it’s only February – then you could have massive crowds roaring on big matches with added meaning. The way it is at the minute, players are just trying to get to a stage where they can make sure the rest of the games have less meaning as quickly as possible so they can focus on the summer.
And, because of that, a lot of counties see their campaigns peter out. They get seven league games and they’re told they mean nothing in the grand scheme of things. Those are followed by two or three championship matches and, for too many, that’s it.
