GERARD O’KANE: The cream rises to the top

“THE cream always rises to the top”. That saying is pretty much how the football fared out last weekend in both Derry and Tyrone club championships.

Derry are down to the last four – what many people would perceive as the four strongest teams in the championship.

Glen are going for four in-a-row and that speaks for itself.

I would imagine people from all over Ireland check the Derry results in the same manner as they check for Dublin results and Kilmacud or Down results and Kilcoo.

Glen’s strongest challengers are Sleacht Néill and Magherafelt, the only other sides to contest finals in Derry in the last four years along with three in-a-row semi-finalists Newbridge, so it’s definitely the strongest teams left standing.

This is in part because they are the strongest teams but also because of the way the championship is run with the group stages and then seeding for the quarter-finals. It means the strongest teams can ensure they can time their run while also managing their squads from the earlier rounds.

However, across the Sperrins where they use a completely different system, it seems the cream is also rising to the top.

Back-to-back chasing Trillick, and three in-a-row finalists Errigal face off in what many would describe as the two best teams in Tyrone coming together.

There is an element of luck to this, not in that they are lucky to get a final, but more so in that they are on the other half of the draw given they would have been regarded as the number one and two seeds before a ball was thrown in.

The same also applied in Down, where Kilcoo and Burren face off in the final yet again. They have a back-door system but it is an open draw and there was a chance these teams could have met along the way but they didn’t. Again the two best teams in the county are in the final.

No matter what system is employed in counties, it goes to show that the best teams are usually getting it right most of the time and shocks are few and far between.

This is a culmination of both the hard work put in by the top teams, the result that they are getting better and better each year. But there’s also the fact that football has become so conservative, and dare I say it sterile, that teams no longer take the chances they used to.

The style of football played is dictating that there are fewer and fewer shocks year-on-year. When teams set up to not get beat, they are immediately handing the initiative to the better team who will inevitably have the lion’s share of possession as their opponents don’t want to engage them and expose themselves or open themselves up.

The upshot is that while games are maybe tighter on the scoreboard, shocks are fewer and farther between.

The team trying to hold out as long as possible and survive on minimal possession and looking for a sucker punch at the end has to take 80-90 per cent of the chances afforded to them which is difficult to do. There is minimal room for error.

Some of the club games last weekend showcased this but I would add in that the weather last weekend across the board made it so difficult to play any sort of expansive and free-flowing football that the quality of most of the games was pretty poor. In most cases it was a game of two halves. Most of the football I saw was played in gale-force breeze conditions which made scoring very difficult all round.

The team playing against the breeze often set their stall out to keep a team from scoring as much as possible with the breeze. The team playing against it often has 13-plus men behind the ball and they might succeed in keeping their opponents from scoring but it’s to their own detriment of scoring very little. Then the second half often mirrors the first half only in reverse with the teams. Games might be exciting coming down the stretch as the scorelines are close but beyond that there is very little for a supporter to get excited about.

All of the above will make the trial games from the Football Review Committee very interesting. The setting for the games might be a bit artificial, and it is difficult to ask players at this time of the year to go out and give their all, but I suppose it makes more sense to trial them as opposed to firing them in upon teams for the National League, especially given as there are no pre-season competitions.

This all might become a bit clearer next weekend when we see the new proposals in action though it will be difficult to follow them all. God knows how a referee is supposed to cope – but that discussion can be for another day.