Sport

Kenny Archer: Seeding would make fairer Ulster championship playing field

Kenny Archer

Kenny Archer

Kenny is the deputy sports editor and a Liverpool FC fan.

Cavan will at least avoid this year's Ulster SFC preliminary round - but should the competition be seeded? Picture: Seamus Loughran
Cavan will at least avoid this year's Ulster SFC preliminary round - but should the competition be seeded? Picture: Seamus Loughran Cavan will at least avoid this year's Ulster SFC preliminary round - but should the competition be seeded? Picture: Seamus Loughran

SEEDINGS.

There you go.

Sometime you don't need 900 words to set out your idea in a column. One will do.

Or four, to be clearer:

Seeded Ulster football championship.

Now we know (as most of us surely anticipated before last week's announcement) that we're set for knockout inter-county football championships again this year, this is a plea for an element of fairness in the forthcoming draws.

If it has to be knockout, it would obviously be fairer to have an open draw, across the island, but that's not going to happen.

Obviously this column isn't expecting the provincial numerical imbalances to be addressed or corrected either. Teams from Connacht and Munster will continue to have fewer rounds to negotiate to reach the All-Ireland semi-finals.

Ironically, counties in Ulster and Leinster may well be glad of those extra games this year – yet, stating the bleeding obvious, only if they get them.

And the odds are evens that your county won't get another match, no matter which province you're from.

We're all so grateful, and excited, about the prospect of some, any Championship games that no one seems too bothered that there won't actually be all that many of them. Not in football anyway.

The principle of a second chance was in place in football for almost 20 years, from 2001 with the introduction of the qualifiers system, up until the coronavirus pandemic changed so much in 2020.

Hurling opened the back door even earlier, albeit in a more limited fashion, giving the big guns a second go.

The small ball code has made much bigger changes since then, moving to what is now a five-tier championship system.

As a consequence, every hurling county will get a second chance in their Championship this year, certainly at least a second game.

Many of them will get three or more matches. That's done either through a round robin format or via promotion or relegation play-offs.

Yet half the football teams will get one Championship match. Only one. And that's it.

Lose and you're gone. Many by the end of June.

Logistics may dictate that, with the condensed inter-county schedule enforced by both coronavirus lockdown delays and the switch to a split season schedule, county first, then club.

Surely, though, we can make better of a bad job?

No county just throws all its clubs together into one big pot and declares 'the devil take the hindmost'. No, there are senior, intermediate, and junior draws, at the very least, and all sorts of grades and combinations in certain counties.

Leinster and Munster both deploy some forms of seeding in their football championships, rewarding the previous season's finalists or semi-finalists, giving them a bye past the initial round of the competition.

There's a tougher approach up north, though.

It's only in recent years that Ulster has even stopped teams being at risk of appearing in the preliminary round in consecutive seasons. Back in the day that actually used to be guaranteed.

Still, after two fresh teams are picked out for this year's preliminary round, the other seven will all be pitched into the same bowl together.

Everyone, quite rightly, talks up the benefits of teams of similar standing being pitted against each other in the National Leagues.

Yet when it comes to the Championships that idea of meritocracy doesn't appear to matter, certainly not at first.

And this year, as in 2020, first can be last, in terms of your first game also being your last game.

Seedings won't end the unfairness of half the football counties only getting one Championship game, of course.

However, at least such a system would offer some reward to the better teams.

There's little or no consolation in losing to a good team, particularly if that's the only game you get.

Most Derry folk have little fondness for that classic Celtic Park clash with Down in 1994 – because the host county lost.

The debate should really only be about how you decide the seedings, the best and fairest method of calculating the relevant rankings.

There are websites, based on complicated mathematical models, which set out the counties in order from top to bottom, rating them based on previous championship campaigns.

Or there are League tables.

Perhaps seeding should be assessed on performances over an agreed number of seasons.

After you've agreed the seedings, the question is how you use them.

It wouldn't have to be top against bottom and so on, but there should at least be two pots to come up with a fairly balanced draw.

One that would at least give the better teams a decent chance of making it through to the semi-finals.

Maybe it's just a perception, but too often in Ulster there seems to be an 'easy' side of the draw and a much harder section (although Cavan gave the lie to that last year, beating Donegal, who'd previously beaten Armagh and Tyrone).

Of course, the absence of seeding increases the likelihood of close contests from the outset, and maybe that's a good thing.

Still, it's hard to shake off the thought that everyone spent decades complaining about so many teams putting in so much effort all for just one Championship match – and now we're back exactly in that situation. (Not that anyone has been doing any training. Obvs.)

Perhaps, though, this is all a clever conditioning process, subliminally adjusting minds to the thought that group formats are the best way to go in terms of running championships.

After all, the Special Congress later this year will ask delegates to consider more significant chances to the football Championship formats, including a form of League Championship.

The experiences of this year and last may well make many counties think twice about the best way to organise Championships in the future.