Cahair O'Kane of The Irish News joined Off The Ball AM over Skype to discuss his recent article with former Armagh footballer and All-Ireland champion Kieran McGeeney.
In the piece McGeeney talked about the need to change the structure of the league, possibly adding more inter-county games and sacrificing the pre-season cup competitions, an idea O'Kane agreed with if it meant more games and less training for players, and more availability for their clubs.
"There was one case in Ulster where a player spent two years on a county panel, and basically played three games across those two years because, he wasn't getting any game time for his county team and he wasn't then allowed to play for his club. It just became a mess to the point where he sort of packed it in".
"Introducing more national league games and tightening it up a bit would basically reduce the training to games ratio that exists at the minute, which can be as high as six or seven to one in some cases where you're training constantly and not playing games, or higher if you're on a subs bench every week".
When it came to the ideal number of games for both club and country, O'Kane had a figure in mind that was in line with McGeeney's, one that would allow players to not only get games for their club, but would allow them to reap the rewards of the effort and commitment needed to play for their county.
"If they're playing two-thirds of their club games, they're naturally going to miss games because it's inevitable, it's impossible not to. But if you were getting 11 or 12 club games, and in Kieran's idea 13 or 14 inter-county games maybe across a year there's 25 or 26 games across nine or ten months, that does seem very acceptable".
"I'm sure most players would prefer that, as to training for 10 months of the year and playing six or seven league games and maybe two championship games, which is not a great return for the effort that goes in".
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