Three strikes and you’re still in is ‘not great’ for the football championship, admits Jarlath Burns

Burns was speaking at the launch of the All-Ireland hurling championship at the Michael Cusack Centre in Carran Co Clare, birthplace of the GAA’s founder. And his view came the day after he was part of a delegation to Munster GAA to consult on possible changes to the football championship.

The GAA are putting a number of tweaks to the provinces for feedback with a view to Central Council making some changes, if there’s support, for 2025. This weekend, Derry and Westmeath in Group 1 and Roscommon and Cavan in Group 2, can all proceed to the preliminary quarter-finals, having lost three times already in the championship.

“That’s not great,” said Burns. “That’s why we’re doing the roadshow, because we know that this sort of anomaly that exists where Derry can be beaten three times [but] beat Westmeath and they’re into a preliminary [quarter-final], possibly against Louth or whoever, and they’d fancy their chances. And then they’re into a quarter-final.

“One of the options is where if you’re put out in the first round, you have another go through the back door and that’s it. That’s something that is attractive.

“The option where the provincial champions go on straight into the quarter-finals and the rest play in group of three is great but that leaves five weeks of a gap [for the champions],” he reasoned.

“That can leave a team go stale. Five weeks is a long time after winning a provincial and then if one or two of them lost, you’d hear the inevitable. One of the things we need to realise is there are no solutions, there are compromises and this compromise will affect that and that compromise will affect the other thing so it’s a very difficult situation we find ourselves in,” he accepted.

The question of timing did not elicit much opinion in Munster deliberations and Burns acknowledges that a move back to September All-Ireland finals – something he floated on GAAGO’s Ratified magazine programme earlier in the year – is unlikely.

“I get so many letters and there are a cohort of people who really miss the September All-Irelands. And one of the things that we need to explain is that could happen, comes at a price,” he said.

“And the price that would have to be paid would be that every county would have to adhere to a particular way of running their own championship. So if you’re in a genuine hurling-football county, it takes 14 weeks to run off your championship. They have to find those 14 weeks from somewhere.

“And the more I think of it, the more difficult it would be to go back to September, much in all as for obvious reasons, it would be great.

“I do have a concern about one week between the All-Ireland hurling and football finals because the hurling final should create ripples of talk and excitement,” he added. “There should be two, three weeks out of it before you’re ready, then, for the football final, rather than hurling final-football final straight away.”

Burns has also advocated better promotion of the inter-county games through better media engagement. None of the four competing counties in the two provincial hurling finals staged press briefings beforehand, while it was limited among football final participants too.

Burns even admitted he had to lean on a few counties whose players were attending the launch in Clare over two days for presence at the event.

“We’re shooting ourselves in the foot if we’re not having press occasions,” he said. “It is disappointing sometimes when counties don’t understand that. I understand that a county manager might want a player that night or be afraid that he might say something that might be used against him,” said Burns.

“But our players are all sensible enough now to know. I just think that we need to put ourselves back in control in terms of the promotion of our games.

“It took a wee bit of an intervention from myself with the counties who were training last night to say ‘lads we need this. Your sponsor will value the amount of coverage you’ll get’. I definitely think we need a bit more from some counties.”​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​