The structure of the All-Ireland championship has long been talked about with no solutions found. On tonight's show, Off The Ball's Colm 'Wooly' Parkinson presented his proposal for changes to structure and the calendar. Here's what he had to say.
A lot of proposals are complicated and a lot of them won't get past congress because they would do away with the provincials.
What I did was try to think of a way to keep the provincials, let all four councils keep their power but separate the provincials from the All-Ireland series. That's the vital part of this.
The provincials needs to stay and the GPA survey returned the fact that a lot of the players have a lot of time for the provincials and don't want to lose them.
Supporters don't want to lose provincials and players don't want to lose them. Let's keep them. Let's separate them from the All-Ireland.
A basic layout of The @Woolberto Plan: pic.twitter.com/GOEg3Ym9pZ
— Off The Ball (@offtheball) June 9, 2015
So, in January or February play Sigerson Cup competitions. Senior inter-county season starts in March with the provincial championship. Club championships finish in the calendar year with the Club All-Ireland in December.
You only need four games to win a provincial championship, so that can be played off every week for a month, no problem, provincial champions at the end of March.
Basically, all I am doing is flipping around the year, bringing the provincials away and having the national league as the All-Ireland series.
So there are four divisions. Divison 1 and 2, comprised of Divison 1A and 1B (which is 1 and 2) and Division 2, comprised of Division 2A and 2B (which is 3 and 4).
It's seven games against teams of your own standard. So you've seven championship games. All major competitions in world sport run their main competitions off as a league.
Now, if you want to give more prestige to the provincial championships, maybe the winners all get two points leading into the league.
So the Top Four in Division 1A play the Top Four in Division 1B in the All-Ireland quarter-finals and Top Four in Division 2A play the Top Four in 2B. Sixteen teams have a chance to get into All-Ireland quarter-finals.
Play them all in Croke Park and that means Division 3 and 4 teams get to play in Croke Park in an All-Ireland quarter-final and put the Division 2 matches in with the Division 1 matches, mix them up so there's massive crowds and they all get to play in Croke Park and you've got quarter-finals, semi-finals and finals.
The final is halfway through August and that works out perfect. So seven championship games and it takes 10 to win an All-Ireland.
Billy Joe Padden joined Wooly on Off The Ball tonight to discuss the proposals and you can listen into the full debate via the podcast:
