Following Clarinbridge’s defeat of Athenry in last year’s Galway county final, An Moltóir offered the opinion in his local hostelry that Birr would now have to be installed as favourites for the All-Ireland club championship...

The very notion was pooh-poohed by a member of the company, who had it on good authority that all the Birr players were on the booze, citing in particular a couple of the team’s younger players. According to this reliable source, the best of Birr would be lucky to get out of bed on match days, and would find themselves slipping on their own vomit if they tried to move out on the pitch.

Well, to be honest, the Offaly men made heavy weather of getting to Thurles last Sunday. Castletown should certainly have put them out at the first time of asking in the Leinster final, and only a couple of poxy goals separated them from a good Dunloy outfit in the semi-final. But they were a different proposition altogether with All-Ireland medals staring them in the eyes. While their overall greater experience was a key factor, so was the performance of their younger turks, with Stephen Browne and Rory Hannify coming to mind. With talents such as these coming through, one should be wary of writing off the hurling future of the Faithful County. Above all, last Sunday we saw once again perhaps the greatest strength of Offaly hurling over the last twenty years – the ability to suffocate opposing teams to death.

One of the big talking points of this year’s club championship has been the suggestion that the semi-finals should be played before Christmas, in order to avoid the gluepot conditions of playing pitches in February. However, even the GAA must realise that the idea of a four-month gap between semi-final and final is a non-starter. Indeed, the poor conditions in Thurles last Sunday indicate that the real solution to this problem is to finish the competition off completely before Christmas. This might also help avoid the disastrous loss of form which afflicts some clubs over the winter break – of which Sixmilebridge were a spectacular example last year.

The idea of completing both county championships and the All-Ireland club championship in a single season is hardly outrageous. In junior soccer, virtually every club in the country starts out in the FAI Junior Cup competition at the beginning of the season, and they still manage to finish it out in good time before season’s end. Of course, in junior soccer, the cup competitions are just a pleasant diversion from the regular fare of league competition. In many GAA jurisdictions the reverse continues to be the case.

An Moltóir’s proposal is quite simple. All county senior hurling championships should be completed by the end of August – hardly a tall order. Play the All-Ireland hurling final on the first Sunday of September and the first round of the club championship the following weekend. If preliminary rounds are needed for weaker counties, get them to finish their county championship a bit earlier. Counties which fail to finish their own championships in time either get thrown out or are required to nominate a club to take part in the club championship. Play the provincial semi-finals a fortnight later, the finals in early October, the All-Ireland semi-finals two weeks further on and the All-Ireland final on the first weekend in November. A tighter schedule could complete the competition in October. Either way, conditions are likely to be better than St. Patrick’s Day and the finals will have built up to a real crescendo of popular interest.

This proposal would also force the GAA at county level to face up to the ridiculous tendency for counties who are going well in the championship to virtually cease all club activity during the best playing period of the year. This tendency to sacrifice the ordinary club player for the tiny elite minority is neither fair nor doing any good for the association. The introduction of the universal backdoor this year will make matters much worse in this respect. Clubs should be required to get on with their own competitions, either with or without their star players.

There is further fodder here for An Moltóir’s previous suggestion that the GAA should replace the intercounty championships with an elite club league as its premier competition. Incidentally, An Moltóir never suggested that the intercounty competition should be done away with altogether, as the wording of An Fear Rua’s "vote-on-it" motion indicated. Rather, the proposal was to run this competition off in September and October. Doing this in tandem with the club championship would have the effect of significantly extending the length of the "popular" GAA season.

This leaves the question: what should the GAA do with its long-valued St. Patrick’s Day slot? Well, one suggestion would be to leave it to the parades and the pubs. A more positive proposal would be to use it as the occasion for a major charitable fundraiser, involving a double-bill encounter between the All-Ireland champions and the All-Stars in both football and hurling. No doubt John O’Shea of GOAL, with the help of a couple of top players (or maybe even Niall Quinn) could whip up 20,000 or so spectators for such an event, if properly hyped. The players and mentors of the winning teams could be given a week away in the sun as a prize for winning, in order to generate an appropriate competitive edge, with further generous prizes for the man-of-the-match winners. Not quite full professionalism, perhaps, but possibly a satisfactory alternative as far as the players are concerned.