'Has hurling had enough exposure as we head for championship?'

Diarmuid O'Flynn

When the details were first announced I wasn’t a fan of this new Allianz Hurling League format, the split-division six-team five-game sprint in which there is minimal room for error and thus minimal room for experimentation.

Having seen almost a full season of it I'm still not convinced, and I believe hurling would be much better served by a return to the format of the last couple of seasons, albeit with two slight modifications.

1) Keep the eight-team divisions but reintroduce divisional semi-finals, giving more teams something to play for as the league progressed.

2) Introduce a relegation/promotion playoff between the second-last division 1 team and the loser of the division 2 final, repeated likewise down through the divisions.

We have what we have, however.

You'd imagine, wouldn't you, that with just one round to completion, the people who would be most displeased at the cut-throat nature of the new format would be the new managers, those who most need time to bed into their new positions, who most need games to get to know their players.

Yet last Saturday evening in the Gaelic Grounds in Limerick, their teams having just drawn a game that sees them both teetering on the edge of a final playoff place, two such managers - John Allen (Limerick) and Ollie Baker (Offaly) - were enthused by it all.

John: “This result changes nothing, we still have to go to Antrim and win but that's the challenge you need.

"You don't want to go up there with nothing at stake. Now it has value, that's what we want, we want quality games with value that are competitive.

"Hopefully we get over that and we'll be playing again the Sunday after (division final) - there's a big break between championship and the end of the league, unless you get to the league final proper. But that's a long way away.”

"Ollie: “We need to win now in Tullamore in our last game, against Clare - it's great.

"When we lost in Wexford (round two) it was a do-or-die situation for them; having lost to Antrim in their opening game Wexford had to get a result against us or they were gone after only two rounds, so they fought us to the bitter end and got the win. It was the same for our lads against Limerick, they showed great character, came back from six points down, fought for a result - do-or-die again.

"It's going to be the same again next week now, and isn't that the way every game should be? It doesn't guarantee you a good result but it does guarantee you that your players are going to give their best every time.

"That has to be a positive.”

Okay Ollie, it’s a positive, as has been the fact that every game had real meaning, but has hurling had enough exposure as we head for championship?

Have yourself and John had enough games in which to form your impressions of your strongest 15, have enough players had enough chances in which to stake a claim? What if you took two teams from division 1B and put them into division 1A, wouldn't they have been better served? And if you had four semi-final places on offer, two teams in relegation trouble, it would mean a lot more to play for than was the case last year and the year before.

Okay, a negative is that four division 1B teams would find themselves in the company of four current division 2A teams but there would be a trade-off here, those latter four teams getting a step-up in competition.

In fact if you took the current two top teams in this group, Carlow and Westmeath, they would give any of the bottom four 1B teams a decent game, at the very least. That format, moreover, would give the four division 1B teams more latitude for growth and experimentation.

In summary, mouth-watering and all as are the six games this weekend, crucial as every one of them is, entertaining as it’s all been, I’m not convinced.

Last year’s format needed just those slight couple of tweaks, and I think the result would have been even better.

Source: http://feeds.examiner.ie/~r/iesportsblog/~3/-ia7Uh_Q6aM/post.aspx

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