Gaelic football is in trouble unless the structures of the provincial championships are changed, according to Jack Sheedy.
The Longford manager witnessed at close quarters what almost everyone predicted ahead of their Leinster quarter-final on Sunday – a hammering from Dublin.
Dublin have been racking up similar scores on their way to nine Leinster titles in 10 years.
In Munster, Tipperary had 22 points to spare against Waterford and the question now being asked is how long mismatches like these are sustainable?
Former Dublin player Sheedy reckons that fans will turn their attention elsewhere if something isn’t done to help the so-called weaker counties.
“The gap between the top teams and everybody else is just too great," Sheedy told RTÉ Sport.
“We’re losing the fan base and I think it’s diluted the quality of the game that we’ve had and that, I suppose, I grew up loving.
“I think it’s a football game, I don’t think it’s a basketball game. I think we should get back to something closer to football [so] that we can get supporters in and encourage our kids to come and play.
“I would be in favour of change. Not just in Leinster, in the whole country there’s eight teams really that can win the All-Ireland and everybody else is playing catch-up. Therefore, I think there needs to be a tiered system.
“I don’t have the answer to say exactly what way it can be re-worked.
"But there are enough intelligent people across the board, between the administration side of things in Croke Park and the managers and coaches and players and ex-players, that could come up with something that would be far more watchable because we’re losing supporters across the board."
“If we had gone defensively in that format, it certainly would have kept the score line to a far smaller margin but it still doesn’t cover up the depth of the gap"
Sheedy said that he didn’t consider changing Longford’s approach to the game, claiming that it takes time to bed in a disciplined, defensive structure – something he didn’t have.
Sheedy, who led Longford to promotion in Division 4 this spring, said: “Naturally they’re very disappointed that the gap was so big at the end but at the same time they feel justified in the fact that they went out and played their game and did their best in the way they wanted to play football and the way we felt was best for us.
“I don’t like keeping people behind the ball. I’m a traditionalist in that regard. I’m not sure it’s something that we want to do, particularly in the space of three weeks.
“When we beat Offaly on the 16th of May, we’d three weeks to prepare for that. Jim [McGuinness, Donegal manager] was doing that for a number of years before he achieved success.
“It takes time to work something in and when you’ve spent your whole season preparing in a particular way, to just turn it upside down, tear up everything and go again with something different [is hard].
“If it works, great, but I just felt that our players wanted to play a particular type of football and we stuck with it and we’ll take responsibility for that.
“If we had gone defensively in that format, it certainly would have kept the score line to a far smaller margin but it still doesn’t cover up the depth of the gap between teams at the top level and teams below us.”
