Johnny McIntosh: Mid-tier hurling counties are being neglected

THE Munster Hurling Championship is brilliant. Week-after-week there’s high-quality games between the very best teams in the country in front of thousands upon thousands of entranced spectators.

It’s everywhere else where the problems are, unfortunately. The Corks and Limericks of this world are far too strong for even some of the stronger Leinster counties and that’s without even mentioning the lesser counties.

In theory, I wouldn’t be opposed to a dramatic overhaul of our championships – possibly a Super 12 type format, similar to the football. I wouldn’t even be opposed to getting rid of the Munster Hurling Championship in its totality.

The problem is that there’s too much of a gulf between the top four or five teams and the chasing pack. I’m not sure whether it’s a good idea to have Cork coming to town to face Antrim in the championship, they just seem to be far ahead.

That brings me to the National Hurling Development Committee, which has been re-established by Jarlath Burns.

The sentiment underlying the group seems to be about trying to bring hurling to the masses.

Jarlath’s own club Silverbridge is going to have hurling, and I think there’s maybe 40 or 50 clubs around the country that are going to start hurling for the first time.

The GAA are sponsoring them with starting packs and things like that, but I’m not sure it’s going to achieve much if I’m being honest.

I think the money would be better-served going towards the mid-tier counties, rather than starting up clubs on the west coast of Donegal and places like that.

All that will do is bring in a little bit of hurling to places where it’s previously been barren and that’s all it’s ever going to be. That’s fine, it’s a nobel idea, but if you want to strengthen hurling as a sport across the whole country, I think the GAA should be looking at the teams immediately outside the top six, who have fallen behind for quite some time.

Maybe the GAA think it’s up to the individual counties to paddle their own canoe but it’s really difficult.

I don’t think the Gaelfast experiment in Antrim has worked at all, it hasn’t got us where we want to be.

This committee seems to be more about getting hurls into places where there are none. It’s not really about improving and driving the standard of hurling across the board.

It’s more of a participation thing, and I respect their efforts but I’m not sure it’ll make any odds in the long-run.

If you take Antrim. You’re asking players to commit to seven months of non-stop professional training and what are they actually going to get out of it?

It’s all about avoiding relegation in the league or championship, scraping a win or two. Again you’d have to question whether we really have the right format, but as long as there’s such a big gap between the big teams and the rest, it’s a tricky one to rectify.

If the GAA were to be serious about improving hurling, they need to invest in counties, schools and universities, particularly in Ulster and Connacht.

The GAA should develop Queen’s University and Ulster University as potential centres of excellence for hurling, and they should be going into half a dozen of our stronger schools and bringing in full-time directors of hurling.

Look at the 2024 Fitzgibbon Cup final between University of Limerick and Mary Immaculate College, also based in Limerick. That hasn’t come about by chance and a lot of Limerick’s current players have come through a really strong University system.

All those things are happening almost by accident in football. If you look at St Patrick’s Maghera, who won the Hogan Cup, they’re led by two former Derry All-Stars, Sean Marty Lockhart and Chrissy McKaigue.

It’s similar in places like Tipperary and Kilkenny, there’s that culture of success.

I’d love Antrim to be in a position where we could say to someone like Neil McManus, we want you to go into one of our top schools in Antrim as a director of hurling and that’s your full-time job.

That would be such a boost to our youngsters, you’d have players coming out of those schools at a high level and you’d hand them over to a University system which should be a hurling centre of excellence.

That would feed through to senior intercounty level, but it all goes back to the GAA and what they want, and again I feel like their money would be much better spent on this rather than starting up clubs here and there in lower-tier counties.