GAA Director General Paraic Duffy has announced that no changes will be made to the structure of the All-Ireland Senior Championship
Duffy spoke out yesterday explaining why he disagreed with calls to alter the Championship system, and has now ruled out any immediate changes. Duffy argued that the structure of the tournament is imperfect, but not so much that change is necessary.
Critics of the current system have claimed that provincial champions face an uphill struggle to fight for the All-Ireland title due to the tournament format, and many deem it unfair that provincial losers get two attempts to launch a title bid, whilst winners are eliminated if they lose one match.
Duffy said, “[the Qualifiers] were never devised to give people a second chance. It was devised initially to make sure teams got more than one game in the championship. If you go back to the time it came in the big complaint was that they trained all winter, they lost one game and they were out of the Championship. So the original focus was to make sure every team got a minimum of two games and it does that”.