Mattie Murphy says provincial championships should be scrapped

Galway minor manager Mattie Murphy criticised the GAA’s provincial championship in the wake of his side’s 1-27 to 2-9 hammering at the hands of Limerick at Croke Park on Sunday.

Murphy, in the post-match press conference of the All-Ireland minor semi-final, said Galway hasn’t benefitted from the senior team’s transfer into the Leinster Championship.

Describing the move to Leinster as “unconditional surrender”, the Turloughmore native said Galway has lost out financially as a result.

And he called for provincial championships to be scrapped and replaced with a Champions League format of group games, and then knockout, at senior and minor grades.

Murphy made the comments when asked if he felt the Galway minors, who lost 1-27 to 2-9, would benefit from more games by following the seniors and participating in the Leinster Championship.

“I don’t,” he said bluntly. “I think the minor championship should be played in an open draw. Now, if somebody said to the Dublin footballers that ‘you should go up and play in Ulster, we’d have a nicer championship in Leinster if you were out of it’. Would they cross the provincial boundary?

“We made it easy for the GAA by acceding to their request to go into Leinster. They were going to have to do something and we gave them the easy option. They don’t want to bite the bullet. Provincial councils are too powerful and they’re not going to be the turkeys voting for Christmas.

“Until somebody, somebody with a, you know, for want of a better word, somebody with a bit of balls, turns around and says ‘look it, there are 32 counties in this country, why not do the obvious: four eights’. I’m sure there are 16 teams who would love to play in the senior (hurling championship) – four fours. You’d have your Champions League style draw, everybody playing the same, everybody getting the same amount of chances and you’d have a chance of home and away.

“All we (Galway) have done for Leinster is, we’ve gone into Leinster, and spent how many years in it? Five years in Leinster now and we have fattened their coffers. The reality is what we have done is we have given our opposition extra finance to turn around and whip us.

“You tell me how much we’ve got out of Leinster in the last five years and what have the other counties got? That’s the reality. A lot of the decisions to go in there at the time were political but we still haven’t got much on the political front either.”