Breathing space: Why Gaelic football needs to pump the breaks

Let's party like it’s 1999. A National Football Development Committee was recommending sweeping changes to football, a new championship format was proposed to give teams a second chance, inter-provincials were on the calendar and Kieran McGeeney was lifting major silverware with Armagh.

The more things change, the more they seem to stay the same in a supposedly conservative organisation with an addiction to tinkering.

We’ve had the period of the radicals, with their round-robins and fly goalkeepers, and we’re heading back to the golden era, baby.

All we need now is the reviving of the combined universities and cardinals throwing the ball in and we’ll be home.

In the 25 years since ’99, there has been such an addiction to change that the worm has turned and we’re nearly back where we started.

There must be few sporting bodies that experience such drastic change before inevitably reverting back to the mean.

"Back around the end of the noughties, the silver bullet solution was the restoration of league semi-finals to stop teams losing interest. Now the only way forward is the elimination of league semi-finals, to stop teams losing interest."

Irish Examiner writer Larry Ryan may have been talking specifically about hurling, but it’s a nice summation of what tends to happen in football too.

Take formats from 1999 onwards. There has been straight knockout, the 'back door’ qualifiers with various tweaks such as A and B routes, the ‘Super 8s’, straight knockout again, round-robin group stages and now we’re almost certainly heading back to a format not too different from the ‘back door’,

We’ve had games go to replays, extra-time, extra extra-time, penalties, 45s' and now Central Council have brought more replays back on to the agenda from