Tommy Martin: Why GAA teams are treating the Allianz Leagues as a warm-up, not a priority

Of course, the leagues have long been the underappreciated beauty of the GAA calendar, slogging like Cinderella in the scullery while the championships squeezed into their finery and headed to the ball.

As Kieran Shannon pointed out in these pages in relation to the football version, there was always a Prince Charming in the form of Mickey Harte, Jack O’Connor or Jim Gavin to sweep them off their feet for a late spring sharpener before the real business began. Alas there is no time for such dalliances now and poor Cindy is condemned to a life of domestic drudgery.

As so often with the ills of Gaelic football, Jim McGuinness is getting the blame for a lot of this. Donegal having an Ulster Championship opener a week after the Division 1 final meant that big Jim would not be going anywhere near Croke Park the Sunday before the Derry game.

You could tell him Oasis were doing the national anthem and Coldplay singing Las Vegas in the Hills of Donegal at half-time and he would remain grimly ensconced in his Glenties tactics bunker.

It didn’t help that Donegal beat the last three All-Ireland champions in the opening weeks of the campaign, making it dangerously possible that they would end up having to traipse up Jones’ Road seven days before Derry come to Ballybofey in the Ulster preliminary round.

Thankfully McGuinness came up with the ruse of giving game time to every able-bodied Donegal man in the remaining rounds, running through a panel of 36 players by the time the league was finished. With Pat 'the Cope' Gallagher and several members of Clannad filling out the bench, Donegal managed to drop just enough points to avoid the catastrophic outcome of reaching the league final.

Even then it required a 66th-minute missed penalty against Mayo in their final match to save Donegal from the disaster of getting a chance to win the competition they have been taking part in for the last two months.

Speaking on RTÉ, Tyrone legend Peter Canavan said it was a “travesty” that Donegal were not in a league final, but it was not just McGuinness who was at it. League form is a bit of a rollercoaster at the best of times but the even distribution of points across the Division 1 sides other than Derry shows that no one really went hell for leather.

You had the new rules and the bad weather and the proximity to the championship and in the end, Mayo and Kerry just sort of fell into the final, like when two people get plucked from the Late Late Show audience to do a karaoke competition for a weekend spa break.

I must admit to taking some cues from Jim McGuinness over the last few weeks, in that my interest in the Allianz leagues wavered somewhat. Yes there was fascination with the rule changes and trying to pick out form lines, but as someone with a broad interest in sport, I find that if people who are taking part in a thing aren’t too bothered about winning it, then there might be something on another channel where they are, even if it’s an old episode of The Chase.

Of course, whether the GAA should be worried about the likes of me at all is at the crux of the debate. The decision to squeeze the inter-county calendar into six months was taken for the benefit of the proper GAA folk of the club game, which is right and proper, even if means those who want a year-long Mad Max Furiosa inter-county season are put out.

It’s pretty clear the GAA can’t please all of the people, all of the time – the club grassroots, the inter-county industrial complex, the media machine, the armchair sports punter, the provincial championship loyalists, the county board bean counters who want to rein in costs, not to mention the poor craturs on the executive board of Allianz down to their last ten billion or so.

Pretty much everyone is blue in the face calling for an extra week or two to be found for breathing space in the calendar but even if this happens, you’ll still have that odd sense of the leagues being a pumped-up pre-season competition for the bigger counties, by sheer dint of the fact that they are largely separate from the bit that really matters.

The GAA tried to fix the situation a few years ago under John Horan’s presidency by flipping the provincial championships into the warmup role but this ran into vested interests in Ulster and elsewhere. These will have to be faced down soon or later.

Thankfully, the football rules revolution has shown the GAA might have an appetite for pissing off entrenched factions for the greater good. Managers giving out about long kickouts and whinging goalkeepers told to stay at home have been given short shrift as ordinary GAA folk have lapped up the changes.

So eventually they will have to bite the bullet and put together a coherent Gaelic football season that builds properly to its climax, whenever that may be, and that doesn’t have competitions in it that people don’t really want to win and punters aren’t sure what it is they are watching.

I mean, won’t someone think of the poor, unfortunate German insurance conglomerates?