Seán Moran: Football Championship gets serious after slow start and rush to judgment via irishtimessport
It helped of course that the much acclaimed western spring offensive, which saw Mayo, Galway and Roscommon finish as the top three in Division One, ran into awful trouble last Sunday with all of them losing to teams who will spend next season in Division Two.
One by one, Donegal, Kildare and Cork won matches they hadn’t been favoured to win and in so doing, leapfrogged their more fancied opponents into second place. Galway, alone of the provincial champions, lost a match they were favourite to win, and forfeited the top spot in Group Two as a result. On the basis of reactions to date, it would appear that players and teams are broadly in support of the additional matches. Obviously, winning teams are going to feel positive about format but Ian Maguire, the long serving Cork centrefielder, was not alone in identifying the advantage of the sequence of championship matches when speaking after the county’s first championship defeat of Mayo in 21 years.
He candidly remarked that with the round-robin and “the attendances down”, it didn’t “feel like championship”. As he suggested, the top teams were developing collective identity, residual fitness and tactical familiarity.At the end of the season, the number crunchers in Croke Park will be analysing attendances to see what, if any, shortfall they are dealing with in the first year of this format.
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