Offaly Club Championships: 4 teams from 6 is too many

[DAF]

Surely allowing 4 teams from 6 to qualify for teh quarter finals in our club championship is farcical.It basically turns the group stages into a series of glorified challenge matches and can lead potentially a team winning the championship having lost 4 matches (didnt the Tullamore hurlers lose 3 in 2009).Surely it needs to change to 3 teams from each group with the group winners straight into the semi finals

[bracknaghboy]

I'm not being smart DAF but you'll find that the vast majority of posters here are more than happy with the fact the most championship group games are utterly meaningless. Lads also seem to be very happy with the fact that we do not play our intermediate and senior championships during the core summer months. Strange but you'll find this to be the case.

[Fargo Boyle]

I agree with both comments above. We need to revert back to a knock out championship. Too many meaningless games played out in the group stage. We need to have a knockout system with a back door where every team gets one chance to lose up to semi final stage. The Laois model has alot of merit

[Long John]

The dublin football championship works pretty well on a back door system as well.

I think the main thing is the structuring of games. That's the huge area of concern. Players want games and fairly regular at that.

The current system is a joke where there's nothing for a couple of months and then for instance a dual club plays football, hurling, football, hurling, football, hurling over consecutive weeks. That's just completely unfair on players from a physical point of view for one thing (asking for injuries) and completely ridiculous from a preparation point of view. From a non dual clubs perspective then the hold up on the championship can be a right pain in the arse for them but the other side of it is they have the two weeks between games when they do start which allows for adequate preparation.

Junior Championships started very late this year as well. Complete nonsense as well. No reason why a few rounds are not played definately in May. End of June is far to late to start a championship for players. Interest will be fairly well worn down by then. Very very unfair on the players.

[TheManFromFerbane]

For me the sequences of events were as follows:

1) GAA wants to increase exposure and revenue => Setup the Backdoor System
2) Backdoor System leads to more intercounty games spread further through the year
3) In conjunction with backdoor system being developed, county board implements groups => more club games during the year.
4) For the first few years of this system (around the early 00s) up until recently we had a situation where a club player would find out 6 days before a Championship game that he was out, so 5 minutes before throw in, he would not know if he was going to be playing Championship in 6 days’ time, or in another 3 weeks minimum. Trust me, this lead to far more frustration in players, preparing physically, mentally, living your life in general and booking holidays was impossible.
5) Master fixture list was implemented to provide as much certainty as possible to players, and for the past two years the county board have stuck to it.

The positives are that players know in February what their season is like, can book holidays, plan their training, team weekends all that sort of thing well in advance.

The negatives are, as pointed out, a huge gap between May and July (although you do get a league game on a regular basis), heavy workload on dual players (although it could be managed better by dual club managers) and finishing the Championship in October.

While I agree that it would be great to playing Championship regularly during the summer, in a situation where you want to protect your county players (and that's a separate debate), and the GAA run the Qualifier system, this is really the only alternative that you have. I don't think anyone here would say they love this break in the middle of the summer, they would just see its necessity.

[Lone Shark]

ManFromFerbane has summed up most of the issues there.

The only thing I'd change myself is that the county season takes too long to get going, particularly the provincial system. The Connacht championship, with seven teams, starts in early May and finishes on Sunday. Ulster refuses to schedule two games for any given weekend, and that kind of pig-headedness means that it's only now that most county teams are getting knocked out, which in turn means that in order to run off county championships fully, there needs to be two different seasons - pre and post summer break. That you could do without.