(This is the follow-on to my first blog earlier this week, which you can find here.)

So I’ve outlined the two crucial flaws with the All-Ireland Hurling Championship as it currently is:

1 - The devaluation of provincial championships
2 - The tiering system that bars most competitors from winning the main prize - the All-Ireland itself.

The unfortunate thing about what I’m about to propose is that it’ll have to concurrently take effect in the football series, but this should probably also be welcomed.

Now, I know I promised to propose something radical, and I know that the instant reaction of most readers will be to exclaim that the main part of what I’m about to propose will be to say it’s nuts, and that it would never happen. But it already has.

My proposal is thus:

To seperate the Provincial Championships from the All-Ireland series.

Now, you’ll say it can’t be done; that the provincial championships are too sacrosanct to lose, and that it would threaten the collapse of the games as we know them.I understand this concern, I really do.

But for those of you who can stake a fair claim to being avid followers of the games - what did you think of the Ulster Hurling Championship this year? The final was a month ago, and Antrim won it. No surprise there, you might think.

But this year, Ulster Hurling did what the GAA - and the sports themselves - have needed it to do for a long time now… it seperated the notion of the Provincial Championship from the National one. As a result, for the first time ever, all nine Ulster counties - and London!! - participated in the provincial hurling championship, and by local standards it was probably the best ever. Antrim’s victory in the final was only five points (3-18 to 2-16 over Down) - not much for a team that are supposedly head and shoulders above their opponents up north. The championship also saw some cracking matches - London beating Armagh in a thriller in Newry, and Monaghan scraping past Donegal in a classic at Clones.

Ciara's ContributionThis is what happens when the Provincial Championships become self-serving entities; competitions in their own right. The ten teams in Ulster this year played for the sake of the game; for the joy of participation… for the will to win the bloody thing. The notion of the All-Ireland was entirely seperate to it - Antrim would be entering the Liam McCarthy Cup regardless. The teams took part, simply because there was a competition to play in, serving its own purpose, where victory was the prize and nothing more.

Try and imagine for a second if Leinster Hurling was like that - if Westmeath, Meath and Kildare had a decent crack at playing their more dominant neighbours, where the prospect of convaluted entry into a haphazard, ever-self-amending All-Ireland championship was out the window, and it was just a matter of beating your opponent to get to the next round and continue playing. Why shouldn’t Westmeath or Meath get their crack at playing Wexford or Kilkenny occasionally, in front of their home hurling communities in Mullingar or Navan?

So how’s this - seperate the provincial championships from the All-Ireland, and run them slightly earlier, in the late Spring. Make the Provincial Championships worth winning - and try to get every team to take part. Why not a Connacht Championship where Leitrim or Roscommon get their chance to play Galway?

As for the All-Ireland itself, extend the logic even further. Let’s have a 32-county open draw. Let’s stop messing around and pretending that, even though Kilkenny are usual worthy winners of a national competition, that the nation takes part. It doesn’t - twelve counties get a crack at the whip, and ten of them are across one single belt of the country. So let’s open it up! Let’s give the smaller counties - where there are clubs where people love their hurling! - a chance to play!

Let’s have a tournament that kicks off on the May Bank Holiday weekend, where the weather is breaking and where the people from around the country, who love their game, get to watch their clubmates and countymen earn a fair shot at playing the country’s elite. There are people in every county in Ireland who simply adore their sport, and who deserve the chance to play in the big boys’ yard.

Ask yourself - why shouldn’t the hurling community of counties like Monaghan - who were bottom seeds in Ulster this year, and got as far as an entertaining semi-final against Derry - get to file in their droves into Clones and see their men take on the might of Kilkenny or Tipperary… and probably make quite an intimidating cauldron for the visitors to enter while doing so.

There’s the possibility of some seeding, to make sure that the big teams don’t meet too early - the system can be manipulated to ensure a reasonable amount of competivity. Again, Ulster this year showed how this can work - Monaghan being the earlier, and prime, example. (Monaghan, incidentally, have went on to win both of their matches in the Nicky Rackard Cup, and are enjoying probably their best year in quite a while.)

But what of a back door? For that, let’s switch to football attentions for a minute, because that’ll make my proposal make more sense. When the Football Qualifiers were introduced in 2001 - in a format that remained until the end of 2006 - the basic setup was that the Provincial champions gained automatic entry to the Quarter-Finals, and the people who lost before that entered the qualifier series at later rounds.

In this light, imagine in your mind an Ireland where all four provences were of the same size (eight counties each), and so each provence had four quarter-finals and a pure knockout, where the winners went straight to the All-Ireland Quarter-Finals, just as the Football Qualifiers initially worked. Then just perform two steps:
1. imagine the provences with eight counties from all over the country, removing the notion of regionality, and lose the titles of ‘Leinster’ and so on.
2. Then, simply stop thinking of these structures as being four independent competitions, and simply as a breakdown of a national tournament, without four distinct parts.
Hence, the “Provincial” Quarter-Finals simply become the First Round of the All-Ireland, the Finals become the Third Round, and the losers along the way hop into a Qualifier series.

Now imagine this system being in place for hurling, and imagine the benefits to a county like Donegal, who currently get to participate in Group 3C of the Nicky Rackard Cup, and only get a provincial tournament because the Ulster Council had commendable foresight. My proposed system would let Donegal have at least one Provincial match (more if they win it), guarantee one All-Ireland match, and let them into a qualifier aswell. A couple of games, with a real chance of earning some more. Now tell me that doesn’t make sense for the ideas in which hurling needs a leg-up.

Later in the week, Part 3 will have a fully-mapped out fixtures programme showing how the reformed championships would work - until then, discussion in the comments area is very much welcome.