WILL the winds of change blow through the county leagues in Cork? Tom Wilson certainly hopes so.

The Newcestown football delegate Tom Wilson is backing his club’s proposal that would reduce the number of county league games in both football and hurling.

As it stands, in both codes there are seven divisions of ten teams, meaning each team has nine league games. For dual clubs, it’s 18. With no break in the schedule, it means dual clubs are playing for 18 weekends in a row once the leagues throw in.

Newcestown have put forward a proposal that would reduce the number of teams in each division to eight, resulting in seven games.

This Newcestown Proposal is one of a number of county league format proposals put forward by the county CCC for consideration ahead of November’s county committee meeting.

‘Player welfare is at the heart of this,’ Wilson told The Southern Star.

‘The current situation has us playing 18 league games in 18 weekends in a row, from the first weekend in March to the end of June. We feel it’s heavy going, hard on the players.’

Wilson points to one week in this year’s league campaign that saw Newcestown play three games in eight days – away to Valley Rovers on May 16th (hurling), away to Castlehaven on May 20th (football) and home to Knocknagree on May 24th (football).

‘We had a situation earlier this year where the board decided that teams shouldn’t play on the Sunday when Cork were playing the league final,’ Wilson says.

‘We were due to play Castlehaven on that Sunday morning – they couldn’t play on the Saturday, we couldn’t play on the Friday night, so the game had to go off.

‘It had to be played on a Wednesday night. We had a hurling game on the weekend before and another football game the weekend after. We ended up with 13 players starting three games in a row within seven days.

‘If our proposal was to get it down to 14 games over the 18-week period, it would allow a break or two in the middle of it. The breaks seem to help dual teams, to some extent, during the championship.’

If Newcestown’s proposal was adopted, two teams would have to come up from the divisional junior leagues, bringing the total to 72 and allowing for nine groups of eight.

‘We’ll be looking for the support of every dual club in the county to back it. We think it’s worth backing from a dual club point of view,’ Wilson says.

‘Our fellow dual clubs are all in the same boat, and mostly all of the same opinion. That’s the feeling we’re getting.

‘But the single-affiliated clubs, the senior hurling clubs that are hurling-only and maybe the football-only clubs, they feel that they need to get that many games.

‘But we find very simply, from a player welfare point of view, that 18 games in 18 weeks just doesn’t work.’

The County CCC has put forward a number of proposals relating to the county leagues. The CCC has suggested starting the leagues one week earlier, introducing a break on the May bank holiday weekend and extending the current 30-day timeframe for the re-fixture of games to 60 days.

If the CCC proposal is not accepted by the floor at November’s county committee meeting, then a vote will follow on the three options, based on proportional representation.

Option A is to continue with the status quo – teams would continue to play nine games in both hurling and football in the county leagues, Divisions 1 to 7. Option B would see the number of teams in a division reduced to nine, with eight games in both hurling and football, resulting in three free weekends in the programme. Option C – the Newcestown Proposal – would see the number of county league games reduced from nine to seven in both codes, with five free weekends.

‘The proposal that the CCC has put forward is some help, but the one we put in, we feel, is the best option,’ he adds.