Back Door Turns All-Ireland Race into a Sporting Maze

There was a time when the All-Ireland football and hurling championship was a simple affair – you played the teams in your own province and the four winners played semi-finals before the final took place in Croke Park at the beginning or end of September.

But now you’d need a degree in actuarial studies to keep up with it.

Firstly, the fact that you lose doesn’t mean you’re out – it just means a more circuitous and scenic route to September.

And that’s fair enough for two reasons – it gives players who put in enormous efforts the chance to enjoy a championship that lasts longer than 70 minutes.

And it means extra dosh for the GAA.

In fairness to the Association, it’s not like they have Sepp Blatter in charge – the money goes into the grassroots because there isn’t a parish in Ireland without a GAA club. And there are parts of the country that now have floodlights, for example, when a generation ago they were thrilled to have electricity.

Next conundrum – what to do with Galway’s hurlers given that there’s no one interested in taking them on in Connacht?

You can try them in Munster for a while – and they did. And then you can try them in Leinster – and they are.

So far so palatable – until you come to the draw for the qualifiers.

Even more bizarrely they do this live on radio when in reality you’d need four television screens and an abacus. Because there are more rules and regulations than you’d find in the Ku Klux Klan. There would appear to be at least three bowls – or ‘pots’ – for each draw; one for one group of teams, one for the other, and one for the venue. Which is fine.

But then there are teams in Pot A who cannot play Pot B because they’ve played them already and there are teams in either pot who cannot be at home because they’ve either been there recently or they are the subject of a barring order.

There’s a guy who will explain all of this to you in a way that is best compared to the bank manager droning on about house insurance in that excellent ad on the telly. And – having lost the will to live – the best you can grasp is that you can’t meet a county if three of the players from that team have holidayed in the other county in last three years.

There also appears to be a rule that counties beginning with C are separated, and teams with more than three Sagittarians in their squad have to either drop one of them or forfeit home advantage. The fact that you’re effectively ruled out of meeting any of your neighbours almost inevitably condemns you to a tour of Ireland only previously experienced by a showband on dark Winter nights back in the ’50s and ’60s.

And after a couple of excursions into Injun country, you might survive to rejoin those teams who opted for the more traditional route to just simply win their games in the provincial championships. They’ve been away on holidays, built a house, sent the children to college and taken a night course in wood turning while they waited for the rest to come through what is euphemistically known as the ‘back door’.

So by now the teams who – by virtue of defeat in May or June 30 years ago – would have been three months out of the All-Ireland series are now back in the running to be crowned All-Ireland champions all over again.

For more of Dave’s view of ‘championships’ see this weeks Tribune here.