Hurling must tackle the elephant in the room

The hurling once again failed to deliver at the weekend and it was hard to listen to Sambo McNaughton who was obviously pained by the fact that Antrim had been mauled for the second week running.
Sambo is a proud hurling man who gave it everything when he took to the field and who has put a lot into Antrim hurling since his retirement but he was at a loss to bring any sense to the tankings his side had just suffered.
I thought he was being too hard on himself and the hurlers, they are playing at the wrong level and they can't and won't improve just by turning up against the big boys.
I thought GAA's most important programme the Sunday Game was again poor on the state of hurling in the country.
There was the usual polite silence about the fact that Laois and Antrim had just been destroyed and shouldn't be playing at this stage of the competition.
It's like no one wants to talk about the elephant in the room.
Hurling was the loser this weekend and there is an onus on headquarters to come up with a system which gives us a competitive All-Ireland series and which places the second tier of teams at a level where they can compete.

Leinster not an option for ailing hurling

I see Sambo McNaughton has called again for Antrim to be allowed to play in the Leinster championship.
Sambo is right when he says that Antrim will get no better playing in the Ulster championship and the Saffrons have continued to slip out of contention at national level as the Ulster championship falls further and further behind.
Once I would have agreed with Antrim playing in Leinster as they would be sure to get competitive games as long as they didn't meet the Cats.
However, I think that it has gone beyond competing in Leinster.
It's a long time since the Leinster hurling championship was worthy of the name, it is a one-horse race and the only chance any one else has of winning it is if the Cats field the camogie team.
None of the other sides in Leinster are even competitive on a national level.
In the qualifiers, which will take place over the next couple of weeks, Laois, Offaly and Dublin will all be beaten by Galway and the Munster sides while Antrim will get a bad beating in Waterford who now have something to prove under their new boss Davy Fitzgerald.
I think the malaise in Antrim hurling can't now be fixed by playing in the Leinster championship but by playing instead in an intermediate championship made up of those sides just outside the top tier.
It's only when the Saffrons can prove to be too good at that level that they should move up to take on the titans.
Where I do agree with Sambo whole heartedly is that the status quo is not an option, hurling needs a change, there are too many meaningless games, which the public now avoid like the plague, and no one could argue that standards have risen outside hurling's heartlands.
Doing nothing other than going through the motions can only lead to the game going backwards and no one can want that, can they?