Split season means best of GAA is 'happening at the moment'

As far as the national sport media are concerned, this is the rough edge of the split season.

The month of August, when once the papers would have been writing previews and post-mortems of All-Ireland semi-finals, has now been given over to the homely charms of the club game.

The club championship has increased in national prominence over the years, since the 1970s, when the nascent All-Ireland club finals first elbowed the once prestigious Railway Cup decider out of its plum St Patrick's Day slot.

Coverage of the club scene generally tends to ratchet up as we inch towards the county final stage and then onto the provincial campaigns.

But county championship round robin games are mostly of limited use to the national press, barring the odd viral-type story here or there - David Clifford scored 4-12 for Fossa with a dead leg, Dan Shanahan togged again for Lismore, etc, etc.

Instead, the GAA sections of the national media have largely consisted of updates from the inter-county managerial merry-go-round, which increasingly resembles Serie A back in its heyday.

For some columnists and pundits, the radical change to the GAA calendar has been too much to bear.

The split season has become an all-purpose bogeyman. The current root of all evil. A designated scapegoat for so many of the ills which now befall the game of Gaelic football in particular - some of which would appear to have a tenuous relationship to scheduling.

Frequently, the concept of the split season has been conflated with the, occasionally related but ultimately separate, matter of the inter-county championship format itself.

Roy Curtis, a particularly emotive critic of the new calendar, described the switch to July All-Ireland finals as "a catastrophic act of