THE LAST POINT: ​A few tweaks needed in almost perfect format

Normally, we’d wait to the end of the year, or at least the end of the club championship season, to run the rule over what we’ve witnessed in this year’s Club scene but, contrarian that I am, I’m using the midway point of this year’s Connacht Gold Leitrim Senior Football Championship to advocate that a few small tweaks are still needed for what is an almost perfect format for the county’s club players.​

​To be honest, it feels somewhat superfluous to be talking on this subject as we’re only at the halfway point of this year’s Senior Championship, a maximum of six games needed for a club to lift the Fenagh Cup, barring replays in the knockout games, but maybe that’s why we need to discuss it, while current events are still fresh in the mind.

The subject is a timely one, Colm O’Rourke discussed the epidemic of ACL injuries in the Sunday Independent, laying the blame with the split season, an argument that gets little shrift from the vast majority of players – the split season is here to stay and I’m not too sad about that. Granted there is an overload of games at particular times of the year, but now we attribute the good and ills of the game to whatever our feelings are on the split-season format – too many ACL injuries, it is the split season! Lads heading off to America for the Summer, split season again! Not enough ‘big’ games on the TV, well you know the reason by now.

Truth be told, Jim Gavin and his merry men might have more to do with the rise in ACL injuries than the split season. The new rules means the game is much more energetic and demanding of players, the constant movement and elimination of all those little breaks that were common occurrences in the old game – the delay in taking frees, players taking a breather after knocks and no pressure on kick-outs as teams worked the ball out at their leisure. All these add up but the most transformative change has been the quick free-kick and the punishment of 50 metre advance for preventing a quick free.

We saw that in Ballinamore on Saturday, the vibrant clash between O’Heslins and St Mary’s coming down to a quick free at the very end. I know St Mary’s are unhappy over the decision but I’d rather the quick free than the flashpoints that used to flare up as frees were routinely held up, players hanging onto the ball in effort to get their defences set. The quick free means nobody can relax – a quick thinking player can set a team up for a score in a flash as the old trick of delaying frees is incredibly costly.

But it is the physical toll extracted from players due to that one change in playing rules is truly staggering and it is why I think there needs to be more time between games in the club championship – county players find the demands staggering and I wonder if Mayo’s journey to Sam was facilitated by their early exit from Connacht, the time they spent perfecting their pressing game utilised to deadly effect later in the year?

Back to the Leitrim club scene, I’ve got to stress that the format in use at the moment wasn’t some spur of the moment stuff – it took informed decisions from the CCC and the County Board as well as the clubs and, as I’ve already stated, it has been a huge success and anyone involved in bringing it to fruition has done football in Leitrim a huge service. The raw numbers back that up – 12 games have been played so far this year and, other than Mohill going to town on Aughawillan, the largest winning margin has been nine points.

Five of the 12 games have been decided by a single point, often in added time, one by two points, another by four and the last by seven with one draw into the bargain. Compared to a few years ago when margins often exceeded 15 or 20 points, it points to a far more competitive and entertaining product. That has carried into the Intermediate Championship with six teams on two points at the midway point of the group stages and while the winning margins are definitely higher, the fact that teams can loss one weekend and come back the next demonstrates the competitiveness of the grade.

It is too soon to make definitive judgments on what we’re witnessing – the first round of Senior games was a scoring bonanza but the tallies have dropped since then but what is inescapable is playing 50% of a club’s possible championship games in the space of 16 days is a recipe for injury and over-use. You don’t have to be a chartered physiotherapist or a neuromuscular expert to recognise the signs of players performing with injuries. I know many will say “suck it up, it is championship football and you do everything you can to play for your club” but that mentality shortens the careers of many players and leaves players nowhere near their best on the days they most need to be.

I get it, players get injured in the most innocuous ways but if you want to give them the chance to recover and perform at their best on the biggest stage, we’ve got to give some thought to recovery time and player welfare. Right now, half of the Leitrim SFC is over after just 16 days but it takes seven weeks for the remaining four rounds to be completed and, by the time a player reaches the knockout stages, the damage may be done. A tweak of the hamstring on week one could see a player miss the entire group stage, a dead leg or a bump on the head similarly damaging. There is no guarantee that a two week gap between games will lessen injuries but it would give players time to recover between games and the best possible chance of making it back if the dreaded injury jinx strikes.

Making more changes won’t be easy and some will say there is self-interest in stretching out club games so that more can be covered in these pages. A new format would also impact on the League season and there have been so many changes over the past few years, it is hard to keep track. But what the County Board and CCC, two underappreciated groups, and the Clubs have done over the past seven years since the reforms of the club structures started has been remarkable, the benefits are plain to see. Everyone involved in those decisions deserves the highest praise, we’re all enjoying the fruits of the labour that went into the new format but a few tweaks might just make it absolutely perfect!