Tonight Ballymun Kickhams and St Vincent's will be vying for glory as they replay the Dublin County Final.
But there will be little time to recharge batteries as the winner will have to face St Lomans of Westmeath in the Leinster Championship on Sunday.
Off The Ball received a plethora of texts with many suggesting that the club championships are in disarray.
Football Review Committee (FRC) Chairman Eugene McGee joined Off The Ball's Joe Molloy, Colm 'Wooly' Parkinson and Diarmuid 'Gizzy' Lyng to talk about the growing club versus county debate.
Gizzy began by outlining the existing problems.
"The biggest problem is the fact that at club level that there is such a lack of competitive games. When you break it down, there aren't enough weekends in the year to play the amount of games that are in the GAA calendar. Clubs and counties are over-training, there's just too much time needed on both sides. The county managers have the power to say that players cannot go back to the clubs for a six to eight week period during the National Leagues. I think that has to change because, as much as training is important, people want to play games. You do not play a sport to train, you play a sport to play games."
It seems as if players and the calendar are marching to the beat of inter-county managers' wishes.
Ballymun's James McCarthy and Shane Carthy of St Vincent's ©INPHO/Lorraine O'Sullivan
McGee believes club players have been let down by the current system.
"The over-whelming majority of complaints I get every year are from club players. It gets worse each passing year. There is abysmal treatment of club players. It's a great pity that the GPA decided to be elitist and confine their activities to county players because we need a CPA (Club Players Association). What really worries me now is when the Donegal clubs met a couple of weeks ago and passed a motion that they would not play any club championship matches next year until Donegal are out of the All Ireland. That might mean that they play no championship match until October. Jim McGuinness did the same thing last year. They weren't allowed to play championship matches until the All Ireland final. The championship was railroaded in within 20 days and one of the top players was injured and out until early June."
McGee described it as a "horrible abuse of players" and is adamant that club games can be played between April and September if the people running club competitions "had the ball to make the fixtures".
He feels it is unnecessary that county players - especially those getting minimal game-time - are prevented from lining out for their clubs for four or five months of the year.
But McGee sees the autonomy of the various county boards as an impediment to change "until the GAA central authority put their foot down and insist that one or two rounds of the championship are played when there are gaps of three or four weeks between county games."
Listen to the full debate below or download on iTunes:
Pictured: Eugene McGee ©INPHO/Ryan Byrne
