When Mount Sion won the Waterford senior hurling final at the beginning of September, they gave a great exhibition of skill and style on a beautiful early Autumn day. Their next competitive game was last Sunday - seven weeks later - on a dreadful boggy pitch , in driving rain, against opposition who, just the previous Sunday, had played in the Cork county final. It was hardly surprising, then, that the Waterford city team took quite a while to come to grips with the pace and drive of this youthful Newtownshandrum outfit.

The north Cork side had a simple game plan. Whenever one of their forwards gained possession, he simply passed it sideways to whichever of the O'Connor twins happened to be steaming past - as one of them invariably was. The resultant shots or frees yielded a goodly return throughout the game. By contrast, Mount Sion were not gaining enough possession to operate any kind of game plan. With Tony Browne drifting back into defence to plug leaks all over the place, he rarely offered the forward threat which had devastated all opposition in the club's march to the Waterford title. Furthermore,

Anthony Kirwan - in deadly form in the county final - was completely out of sorts here, while Ken McGrath was also finding it hard to get into the game.

That Mount Sion eventually prevailed was, therefore, more a tribute to their great fighting spirit than their undoubted skill which was largely quenched by a combination of the opposition and the conditions. They also got a few handy breaks. Current minor Eoin Kelly - a first cousin of Lismore's Dan Shanahan (whether this is a commendation or not depends on which Déise supporter you talk to) - took eight steps before burying the ball from an acute angle in the first half. Ken McGrath's early second half goal from a 20-metre free was only made possible when the referee moved the ball forward quite a distance following Newtown dissent. Tony Browne's flicked winning goal from Kelly's long-range free also had a touch of good fortune about it.

It is quite possible that Mount Sion would have won this game pulling up if it had been played in better conditions. It is even more likely that they were penalised by the early completion of the Waterford county championship, as no amount of training and challenge matches prepares you for real competitive action. While Cork's run to the All-Ireland semi-final provides an excuse for the late finish of their internal championship, An Moltóir reckons it is time the GAA took the whole issue of fixtures at both club and intercounty level more seriously.

This will have to be done with Gaelic football in the light of the new All-Ireland championship structures, and undoubtedly a similar structure is in the offing for hurling. The extra inter-county games will require the Association at all levels to face up to the ongoing clashes between club and county which have become an increasing problem in both hurling and football. The club ultimately is the key unit of the Association, but nowadays in too many counties club fixture lists have been reduced to total disarray by the demands of county teams.

It appears to An Moltóir that the GAA has three options. The first of these is to create elite county squads along the lines of the current provincial rugby squads, made up of players who rarely play for their clubs. This would impoverish the senior club scene at county level, with younger aspiring club players rarely getting the opportunity to pit themselves against the best players in the county, and with top clubs being penalised by the loss of their best players to the county team. Mount Sion, for example, are likely to have up to eight players in the Waterford senior panel in 2001.

The second option for the GAA is to insist that county players play in all competitive games for their clubs, regardless of the proximity of important inter-county games. An edict that all county senior championships be completed by, say, the end of September would greatly assist in achieving this objective. It might additionally sort out the dubious GAA tradition of granting postponements of games for the flimsiest of reasons. It would also enhance the prospect of getting the provincial club championships completed in reasonable weather conditions.

The club championships have come on in leaps and bounds in recent years, and have now taken the place once occupied by the Railway Cup and Oireachtas competitions as high-profile early and late-season tertiary competitions. They regularly throw up wonderful contests (regardless of the conditions, as we saw in Walsh Park last Sunday). TG4, to their credit, were quick to recognise this, and moved to fill the gap shamefully neglected by RTE, who insisted on showing us dreadful Eircom National League soccer matches played before empty terraces while GAA clubs slugged it out for the honour of parish and county before baying mobs all over the country.

The third option for the GAA is to take the development of the club championships a step further by placing inter-club competition at the centre of the Association's calendar. What An Moltóir is proposing here is the creation of an elite All-Ireland club championship, to be played off on a round-robin system during the April-August period. The clubs in question would not play their senior squads in their own county championships. In hurling, for example, the country's top 16 clubs would play off in two eight-team groups, with the top two or four qualifying for the knock-out stages. There would still be a club championship for county champions, with the finalists moving up to the elite competition, and the bottom two from the latter dropping down to their own county level.

Under these proposals, the inter-county championship would become a straight knock-out competition to be played off in September and October, as a kind of end-of-season "all-stars" event. While this proposal would undoubtedly be greeted with stunned disbelief by the stick-in-the-muds who run the GAA, it has a number of attractions. It eliminates competition between club and county. It allows for the possibility of some counties having two or more clubs in the elite competition, which would help combat inequality between counties of different population size. Thus, in any given year, a single elite hurling club from Waterford or Offaly would have an equal chance of All-Ireland success as one of two or three clubs from Cork or Galway. Already, one of the great advantages of the club championship is that it has given counties with little hope of inter-county success, such as Carlow and Antrim, some taste of glory on the big stage.

There would be more clubs, from more counties, in real contention for national honours than is currently the case with the inter-county championships, thereby generating added public interest and strengthening the position of the GAA in the weaker counties . The decision, made a hundred years ago, to place the county at the centre of GAA competitions was inherently unjust, as it gave the counties with a big population base a huge advantage (notwithstanding the success of some smaller counties like Offaly and Kilkenny). It is ironic that the GAA, with its nationalist traditions, should be using administrative units which were created as part and parcel of the English conquest of Ireland and which meant very little to the ordinary people of Ireland at the time the GAA was formed.

It would be argued, of course, that this proposal would mean an inevitable drift of better players to the elite clubs and hasten the onset of professionalism. However, An Moltóir doubts whether most hurling supporters in, say, Laois would care a whole lot who was playing for Port Laoise or Camross, or if they got paid a few bob for their efforts, were they to bring home an All-Ireland title to the county.