THE madness of the All- Ireland SFC must end and we must bring back some jeopardy to our summer.
As SunSport Einstein Babs Keating would say, ‘Repeating the same thing over and over again and expecting different results is the definition of insanity’.
Babs may have been questioning the weight of the sliotar but this piece will focus on the football Championship and how its current format is dragging the game down.
When the provincial series concluded, we were left with 16 teams.
Twenty-four games later, we have whittled that number down by just four.
Folks are rightly up in arms that strugglers Derry, Monaghan and Roscommon are into the preliminary quarter-finals having won a grand total of ONE group fixture.
Dig into those results a bit more and the silliness becomes all the more apparent. Take Derry for example — they have played four Championship games, lost three and finally got a win on the board when they beat Westmeath at the weekend.
Galway on the other hand, have played six, won five and drawn once — on Sunday against Armagh.
Yet Pádraic Joyce’s find themselves in the same position as the struggling Oak Leafers. Absurd!
The Tribes do have the benefit of a home game against Monaghan this weekend while the Ulster outfit must travel to Mayo, but that doesn’t seem like much reward.
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An All-Ireland group series lacking in real excitement finally sprung to life at the weekend when Dublin rescued a draw against Mayo to top their group after Armagh had clawed back the Tribesmen a few hours earlier.
But two out of 24 doesn’t paper over the cracks.
The public have spoken with their feet too, summed up by the 11,000 who turned up at Croke Park to watch Dublin beat Roscommon in the opening round.
Jeopardy is seriously lacking in the SFC and you only have to cross codes to see the contrast, with the hurling provincial round-robin series utterly cut-throat.
Admittedly, we have a habit of talking down football — along with its ageing provincial system — whenever we get the chance, but things aren’t all bad.
Mayo and Dublin was a thriller, as were the Connacht and Ulster football finals last month.
But teams who’ve lost three games getting into the knockout series thanks to one result doesn’t cut the mustard.
Thankfully, the GAA president has already called out the craziness. Jarlath Burns has assured us that change is on the way and that needs to happen quickly.
Only two teams should qualify out of each group and the All-Ireland preliminary quarter-finals should be scrapped.
It’s that simple but we all know in the world of GAA things don’t always pan out that way.
We all have a tendency to wax lyrical about hurling, though the small-ball Championship is not perfect either because All-Ireland preliminary quarter-finals need to be scrapped there as well.
There is no use in Offaly winning the Joe McDonagh Cup only for the party to be spoiled by a pasting against Cork a week later.
Wexford thumping Laois by 12 points in the other game serves no purpose either and is a cruel form of punishment for counties who reach the final in the second-tier competition.
But Burns has been a man of action in his first months as president — so hopefully he can deliver what we have all been crying out for and common sense prevails.