The Leinster and Munster Senior Hurling Championship draws will take place on Thursday - but away from RTÉ’s television cameras.
The draws for next year’s provincial football championships will be made live on RTÉ 2 on Thursday night. Traditionally the hurling draws would be made during the same broadcast, but not on this occasion.
Following the GAA’s recent decision to revamp the small ball game’s structures, which see Leinster and Munster played-off as two five-team round-robin tournaments, the draw has been taken off air.
It will be made at Croke Park on Thursday afternoon instead in the presence of the four provincial chairs and members of the GAA’s Central Competitions Control Committee (CCCC).
The four rounds of fixtures in each province will be drawn - they won’t be decided by committee - and will be made public on the RTÉ 2 broadcast later that day.
The Munster teams are Cork, Waterford, Tipperary, Clare and Limerick, with Galway, Wexford, Kilkenny, Dublin and Offaly in Leinster. In either province, each team will play the other once with two home games and two away guaranteed.
The majority of these clashes will take place during the month of May, though they may spill into June and exact dates won’t be decided for another few weeks.
The draws for the four football provinces will be made live, however.
Starting with Connacht, we already know that Leitrim will travel to New York and Sligo are on their way to London as these fixtures are made on a rotational basis. The winners will move into the semi-finals.
Galway, Mayo and Roscommon are in the pot for the other quarter-final and the one team that doesn’t come out of the hat will get a bye into the semi.
In Leinster, Carlow, Laois, Longford, Louth, Offaly, Wexford and Wicklow are all in the first round draw. Last year’s semi-finalists, Dublin, Kildare, Meath and Westmeath, go straight into the quarter-final pot.
The Munster football quarter-final draw will contain Clare, Limerick, Tipperary and Waterford. Cork and Kerry are given a bye straight through to the semis.
As always, the Ulster draw is completely open. Into the pot will go Antrim, Armagh, Cavan, Derry, Donegal, Down, Fermanagh, Monaghan and Tyrone - the first two out will go into the preliminary round and the rest into the quarter-finals.
The draws for the All-Ireland Senior Football Championship qualifiers and the Super 8 - the two four-team round-robin groups which will now replace the quarter-finals - aren’t being made on Thursday. They will be made as the competition progresses next summer.
There are slight alterations to the football qualifier format this year. The draw is no longer divided into A and B sections, which had been in place for the last five years in order to both avoid long waits for teams and allow others enough time to recover following provincial elimination.
All teams that don’t make their provincial semi-finals will go into Round 1 and in Round 2 the winners will meet the beaten provincial semi-finalists. The Round 2 winners play off in Round 3 and Round 4 features the beaten provincial finalists.
All qualifier games will be played to a finish in 2018. If teams are level after 70 minutes they will play two extra periods of ten minutes, followed by two more periods of five minutes if required.
If they finish level after 100 minutes of football a free-taking competition from the 45-metre line will decide the winner.
Each team must nominate a list of five players who featured in the game to take their free kicks in the contest. It doesn’t matter if they didn’t finish the game as long as they played at some stage, though anyone red carded or given a black card cannot take part.
Initially, the free-kick contest will be decided on a best-of-five basis, but if counties are deadlocked after five kicks apiece it will move to sudden death, with the same five players taking kicks in the same order as before.
Group 1 of the Super 8 will comprise the Munster and Connacht champions plus the beaten Leinster and Ulster finalists, or the team that beats them in the last round of qualifiers.
Group 2 will be made up of Leinster and Ulster champions along with Munster and Connacht runners-up or the qualifiers that beat them.
In hurling, the top two teams in each group will progress to the provincial final with the winner of that going straight to the All-Ireland semi-finals and the losers going to the quarter-finals.
The third place team in each province will play one of the top two teams from the newly created tier two competition - possibly to be called the Joe McDonagh Cup - in a preliminary quarter-final with the two winners going forward to the quarter-finals.
If the team that wins the tier two competition is from Leinster they will be promoted straight to the provincial championship the following season with the bottom team dropping down. If Kerry top tier two, they will have to play-off against the bottom team in Munster to earn promotion.
The All-Ireland hurling qualifiers have been done away with.
The major changes to hurling and football were made at GAA Congress in February and September’s GAA Special Congress and will run on a three-year experimental basis. The GAA say that the changes will benefit club players, who will have more time for games.
The GAA Championship draws will take place live on RTÉ2 on Thursday, October 19, live from 8.30pm. For exclusive behind the scenes extras and in-depth interviews check out our Facebook Live.
