Sharp Eye wrote:A disappointing year for Raheen who were strongly fancied by many to make a major impact in Senior A over the next 3/4 years. It has also been a disappointing year for Dangean. The new structure of the Offaly Senior championship with just 8 teams playing senior football has not resulted in new teams breaking through or in an improvement in the standard of Club Football. Consideration should be given to increasing the senior championship to 12 teams in order to give more clubs & players the chance of playing senior football.
When we had twelve teams at senior, we had utterly lifeless championships where the gulf between the top and bottom was utterly huge. Even now, within the current eight team systems, there are big gaps - as evidenced by how far adrift Ballycumber were at senior A (in the best group they could have hoped for) and how similarly way off the pace Doon and Walsh Island were in senior B.
Putting the title "senior" on it doesn't make it senior. If you have twelve senior clubs next year and you have a group of, for example, Rhode, Ballycumber, Durrow and Tubber. Rhode will hammer the three of them in non-entity games, and the other three matches would probably be close enough - but they'd be effectively no different to the Senior B games now.
Measuring the standard of the championships is impossible, and it's utterly incorrect to say that no new teams are breaking through. Shannonbridge have a lot of very young players in key positions, I'd imagine that they probably have two or three lads over thirty and the rest with an average age of 22 or so, and they're in an IFC final. Cappincur, with a very young team too, are one game away from claiming a place in the top eight football clubs in the county. That's a big deal - and I'd say they'd disagree vehemently with your assessment that there are no teams breaking through. And reading your post, it seems as if you'd feel differently if those two sides had lost their semi-finals, and if Daingean and Raheen were now preparing for finals. Which strikes me as odd.
There is no system that will make football better, but we can try and make the games competitive, and meaningful, to generate interest. I would argue that this has happened this year. A few too many games in O'Connor Park, no different to the hurling, but otherwise the championships have been pretty good.
Kevin Egan. Signed out of respect for players and all involved with Offaly.
