Carlow veteran Darragh Foley believes that a two-tier championship system is sufficient enough to give all counties a viable chance of claiming silverware.
The Leinster side enter the Tailteann Cup this weekend as they make the short trip to Aughrim to face neighbours Wicklow on Sunday.
They do so on the back of an Allianz League campaign that saw them finish 30th out of 32. This year's competition features Meath, a side who finished 14th overall – sixth in Division 2.
Those final standings would suggest that a chasm still exists between the top teams and those ranked as big outsiders in the Tailteann Cup, but Foley is not subscribing to the notion of a third tier being necessary.
"I think two tiers is enough, it is up to the likes of ourselves and a few teams in the bottom half of Division 4 to raise our standards, to get up to that level," he said.
"If you dilute it any more it will be very hard to keep lads motivated and bring youngsters through that want to play inter-county football. So I think two tiers is enough, as I say I just want to raise standards, to get up to the levels of your Meaths or the bottom of Division Two teams.
"Apart from maybe the top five or six teams, there is very little between the rest. The Tailteann Cup is great for that. In all of the games last year there wasn't many one sided games, it was fairly even, there seems to be great battles in it, and hopefully we will see that this year too."
Trying to raise those standards has been Foley’s modus operandi now for a decade and a half as he carries the tag of being one of Ireland’s longest-serving county players.
First invited into the panel by former manager Luke Dempsey, the Kilbride man has embarked on his 14th season in the red, yellow and green.
He really caught the eye as part of the exciting crop of under-21s who in 2010 very nearly turned over a Jim Gavin managed Dublin in the Leinster semi-final before a late free controversially went against them in extra-time.
The Dublin team-sheet included the likes of James McCarthy, Dean Rock, Jonny Cooper and Rory O’Carroll – players who went on to taste the greatest highs in the game time after time – whereas bar a brief period under Turlough O’Brien – when they earned promotion for the first time in 33 years in 2018 - Carlow’s crop have been battling lower down the rankings.
"In Carlow this is the highest level I can play at. It is competing against other counties, trying to get the best out of yourself. I'm a passionate Carlow man, I want to see us improve. In the last couple of years I haven't been happy with the way things are going.
"The Tailteann Cup is a great opportunity to get a run of games under your belt, to try to get a run in it. Jack Cooney [Westmeath manager 2022] was only speaking about generational moments there that Westmeath are after having.
"I suppose in 2017 and 2018 we had that in Carlow, that is why I'm still there. I want to have another [feel] of that, to keep interest in football in Carlow. You can see at underage it is hard to keep kids involved in GAA in Carlow at the moment. Rugby is huge down there now so we just want to keep it as relevant as possible, really."
And Foley, who had soccer trials as a goalkeeper with Swansea City, Hull City and Crewe Alexandra, has said that the squad have drawn a line in the sand as they prepare for their group opener away to Wicklow.
Back in January, manager Niall Carew made clear their ambitions for the season when he started that "our expectations are very simple, we want to get out of Division 4."
Three points from their first two fixtures suggested a promotion push was on the cards, but they’d only add another two points from there as they finished sixth in the table.
That disappointment was compounded by a comprehensive eight-point Leinster loss to Wicklow, but Foley is confident a new Carlow will take to the pitch this weekend.
"We had to draw a line in the sand after the first round of the Leinster championship with Wicklow. We view it as a chance to get our season going because we were very disappointed with our league performances and our championship performance.
"We dusted ourselves down, we had the week off after the Wicklow game. We got away for two days on a bit of a training camp [in Waterford], we just reassessed things and what way we wanted to move forward with things.
"We are after getting a good reaction, we played a couple of challenge games. There seems to be a positive uptake, we didn't lose any lads either.
"We have kept the same core which is great for our group of lads. We are hoping to push on, to try to get out of the group. That is the aim, to try to build something."
Pushed for what went wrong earlier in the season, Foley pointed to an accumulation of cards and the cardinal sin of letting Wicklow graft them out of it in their championship encounter.
"I suppose our discipline has been very poor, it has been maybe over the last two years, just getting silly black cards at crucial times in games - little bits of skill errors, simple hand-passes going to ground, simple turnovers. We were getting really punished for them. They were some of the things we have really looked at and we hope to see an improvement in the Tailteann Cup.
"With the Wicklow game in the Leinster championship, they simply outworked us. In a championship game, to be outworked it is criminal.
"You're not going to win any championship games if the opposition just outworks you. It is something we are hoping to put right now on Sunday, leading into the Tailteann Cup group stages."
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