Forget a carrot, league needs to reintroduce the stick

After five weekends of televised low-intensity puckabouts, we have arrived at the knockout phase of the Allianz Hurling League. The one that they all want to win, provided it doesn't take too much out of them.

Prolonging this particular instalment of the national hurling league by means of semi-final games certainly feels gratuitously unnecessary, a bit like when six minutes of injury-time are announced at the end of one of the Dublin footballers' Leinster championship games.

The 2023 edition of the hurling league appeared to be the one where the current structure became untenable. Where every match came accompanied with the constant reminder that what's happening here really doesn't matter in the long run or even in the short run.

When the present structure was unveiled in late 2019, it didn't require much foresight to realise that the league would swiftly descend into a series of jarringly high-budget challenge matches. However, in Gaelic Games, there is a long tradition of only reacting to problems once they actually play out in front of people, even when their implications were spelled out in large print long beforehand.

The brief outcry over Offaly's imminent relegation to the Joe McDonagh Cup in the early summer of 2018 being a fine example of this phenomenon, months and months after it was made plain by the rule-makers that relegation was the penalty for finishing bottom in Leinster.

As far as the crap hurling league goes, the GAA hierarchy's hands are mostly clean given that the current format was the result of concerted lobbying by the union of inter-county managers, who were appalled at having to play for such high stakes on such soft ground so early in the year.

The 2022 season - where Waterford and Cork contested