Champions League format gets thumbs down

PLANS for a radical overhaul of the county’s senior club football championship and league have been shot down by delegates again – for the second year running, the title race will be run on a ‘one-up, one-down’ promotion and relegation system.

A proposal to change the formatof the senior championship into a ‘Champions League’ style system, which would have group stages with the winners of the groups advancing to the quarterfinal knock-out stages, was defeated by a majority of two-to-one at the Football Board Convention at Loughgeorge on Monday night.

Four clubs – Salthill/Knocknacarra, Oranmore/Maree, Dunmore McHales and Monivea/Abbey – proposed the motion for a combination of groups for the earlier rounds followed by knock-out, similar to the senior club hurling set-up. The second part of their proposal also included a major shake-up of the league, which would allow senior, intermediate and junior clubs compete against each other in a ‘super league’ of all grades, which would be divided into districts and organised separately to the championship with its own promotion and relegation.

But after more than one hour of debate, the motion was put to a vote and – despite pleas from Football Board Chairman John Joe Holleran to have the motion withdrawn and referred to a fixtures working group to thrash it out – was subsequently comprehensively defeated by the 78 delegates and six executives who had not yet left the convention. The vote was rejected with 56 votes against and 28 votes for.

The Football Board had hoped to revert to the system of promotion and relegation that prevailed in 2008 and for years previous to that, whereby the bottom two teams in the senior B league were relegated to intermediate, and the intermediate league and championship winners earning promotion.

This system was the norm in Galway for years but was changed for the 2009 championship after the Connacht Council’s fixture monitoring group found Galway was in contravention of the General Rules of the GAA.

As a result this year, Galway’s club competitions had to be run on a ‘one up, one down’ promotion and relegation system between intermediate and senior. In the lead-up to the Convention, the Board had meetings with the Connacht Council and the ‘soundings’ coming from those discussions were that the championship could revert to the old ‘two-up, two-down’ format.

But County Board Chairman Gerry Larkin informed delegates on Monday that promoting more than one team was in contravention of the rules and he said the Football Board would have to ‘stick with’ the new one-up, one down promotion and relegation based on championship and not league results.

For a full page report from the convention see page 49 of this week’s Connacht Tribune.