Opening Shot – Qualifiers ruined the championship

The first five games of the Ulster Championship were damp squibs

By John Hughes

Last October I wrote a piece for the Donegal year book. In that article I breezily dismissed Antrim’s chances of beating Fermanagh in the Ulster SFC preliminary round and then went on to forecast that Donegal would get a bit of trouble in the quarter-final, but they would ultimately account for Fermanagh and book an Ulster semi-final place.

While it’s always nice being right, I had hoped for better from the Donegal Fermanagh match. That didn’t materialise and so far all the Ulster championship has served up are five squibs of varying dampness.

This was always the great selling point of the Ulster championship, the fact that it was a fight to the death and upsets were a regular occurrence.

Being realistic, I don’t think any of Antrim, Armagh, Derry, Down or Fermanagh could say they died with their boots on.

It was hard to escape the feeling in those games that at a certain point the players decided they had given enough and it was time to keep the powder dry for the next day out.

We are in a situation now in Ulster where, rather like the broader All-Ireland series, it only really gets serious when it comes to the knock out stages.

The Southern August Bank Holiday weekend is when the race for Sam really starts.

Now in Ulster the race for the Anglo Celt only starts when we reach the last four. At that stage teams are within touching distance of a final place, so there is always that incentive to keep sides battling to the end. That isn’t there in the quarter-finals, so the potential for shocks is correspondingly diminished.

This is a worrying outworking of the qualifier system.

The qualifiers were brought in to give players more championship games. It’s done that all right, but that increase in has come at the cost of a degraded championship currency.

We’ve just come through five essentially meaningless Ulster championship games. They all went to script, with precisely the winners one would have anticipated. Even to the point where most people could with reasonable assurance have predicted the outcome of the games half a year ahead of time.

If even the Ulster championship has come to this, then there are serious problems with championship football. Championship football isn’t supposed to be about volume, it’s supposed to be about quality, that’s its selling point. The quality comes from every player who crosses the whitewash leaving every fibre of their being out on the pitch in pursuit of victory. When players aren’t committed to the very marrow, then it’s hardly even true championship football anymore.

What the qualifiers have created is a situation where there are about 12 to 14 honest to Christ championship games in the season, when previously there would have been at least double that number.

You look back on Derry and Down in 1994 and wonder will you ever see a first round championship game like that ever again.

Yes, it’s nice to have that quick second shot at redemption that the qualifiers offer, but that undermines one the most addictive aspects of the knock-out championship format. The fact that the losers had a full year to feel that hurt, to feed on it and come back the next year and set the record straight.

It’s ironic. We created a system to address the soul-crushing waste that players felt when they went out of the championship early. Now it turns out that that pain was one of the things that made the whole thing so compelling in the first place. Without that pain, the soaring highs are no longer possible.
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