Once the GAA found a committed, long-term sponsor for its National Leagues in the early 1990s, neither party could accept the competitions as we had always known them. There was a commercial imperative that hadn’t really existed before: the Leagues needed to be sold to a public whose scepticism had been conditioned over decades. For as long as anybody could remember, the Leagues started in early October and meandered like the Mississippi until the beginning of May, by which time a long winter had been killed and summer was back.
The relationship between the Leagues and the GAA public was entirely platonic. More than that, it was passionless. Inter-county managers used the competition to suit themselves and if some managers occasionally harboured a desire to win the League, they never said so.
The challenge for the GAA and Allianz was to give the competition an empirical value. For a long time the record of League winners in the ensuing Championship was mixed at best and this negative correlation was trotted out year after year, underscoring the perceived futility of winning the competition.
Rebutting such an ingrained prejudice was a long-term project. There was no silver bullet. The sponsors ran aggressive marketing campaigns, attractive ticket packages were rolled out, Saturday night games under floodlights came on stream and the GAA continually revisited competition structure to give it a tighter and more urgent narrative.
What they needed most of all, though, was the confidence of hurling and football’s most successful counties and incrementally that came. Kilkenny, under Brian Cody, were in earnest about their League performances every spring, without fail. They have won the League and championship double six times under his watch and what that created, unintentionally, was peer pressure. If it was beneficial for the dominant team in the country to treat the League with respect, every one of Kilkenny’s putative rivals were forced to reconsider their position.
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Football followed. The most recent nine Division One League titles have been shared between Dublin, Kerry and Cork, three of the game’s biggest teams; on five of those occasions it was a pre-cursor to an All-Ireland title. How much of their League form underpinned their performances in the championship was unquantifiable but if Dublin and Kerry and, for a while, Cork kept turning up in League finals it gave the competition a status that couldn’t be generated by mere marketing. Punters could see that the League was being taken more seriously by the teams that mattered and they responded at the turnstiles.
There was a percolation effect too. In hurling and football Division One was more than just a desirable place to spend the spring; competing at that level started to feel absolutely necessary for any county with serious ambitions in the summer.
Organically, that created competition. Managers couldn’t afford to experiment wildly with their team selections as other generations of inter-county managers had done; they couldn’t afford to shrug at the possibility of relegation, while we imagined a knowing wink. The League was no longer a competition about which to be flippant or passive. The outcome was that the League had a vibrant identity that it had lacked for decades.
All of that is under threat now. With the compression of the
inter-county calendar, the League has been shoehorned into two months, beginning on Saturday. There will be a staggering 33 matches this weekend, weather permitting, and more double weekends of hurling and football fixtures than ever. With the GAA committed to clearing April for club activity the only option was to squeeze the League. But how could they do that without eroding some of the prestige and relevance they had spent more than 20 years building? They couldn’t. It was impossible.
On top of that the hurling and football championships have been radically reformed, forcing every manager to reassess their attitude to the League. In the case of hurling there will be four round-robin championship matches in five weeks in early summer. Nobody knows how that will pan out but everybody accepts that there will be injuries, suspensions and cramped recovery time so that the importance of a deep panel has suddenly been heightened.
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Where can new players be auditioned? In the League. That practice hadn’t stopped in recent years but it had been moderated by the common desire of teams to stay in the top division. Risk-averse team selections had become the norm. Winning mattered. That pressure has now been released. Every fan will understand the importance of
squad-building before the round-robin phase of the Championship begins in May and they will understand that League matches may have to be sacrificed to that end. And that’s the way the League used to be in the days when nobody really cared.
Most teams will be eliminated from the hurling League before St Patrick’s Day; the football League will conclude on Easter Sunday. The Championship will feel a million miles away. The League will feel like a pre-season competition. That’s a shame.