Regardless of what unfolds between now and the third Sunday of September, this year's All-Ireland football championship will be remembered for the alarmingly high number of one-sided games it produced.

Calls for the introduction of a meaningful, second-tier championship grow ever louder with each trouncing. Yesterday, Kildare genuinely expected to give Kerry a good game, only to be handed a 27-point trimming.

The Lilywhites recovered from a 19-point drubbing by Dublin in the Leinster SFC semi-final, but it isn't going to be as easy to come back from this one.
Fermanagh, at least, put up a better fight against Dublin, but never looked like winning either.

The GAA now clearly has a huge problem on its hands as to how to prevent the gap between the top four or five elite counties and the rest from widening even further. Lumping the other 27 or 28 counties into a 'B' championship isn't going to solve anything either.

With no disrespect to Ulster champions Monaghan, who have been punching well above their weight in recent years and flying the flag for the small counties, it's impossible to see any county with a population of under 100,000 winning the Sam Maguire again. They just don't have the numbers, money or resources.

For the record, here are the eight biggest mis-matches of this year's championship:

Dublin 4-25 Longford 0-10 (27 points)
Tipperary 1-24 Waterford 0-5 (22 points)
Cavan 2-22 London 0-11 (17 points)
Dublin 5-18 Kildare 0-14 (19 points)
Tipperary 3-21 Louth 0-7 (23 points)
Kildare 2-24 Longford 0-11 (19 points)
Mayo 6-25 Sligo 2-11 (26 points)
Kerry 7-16 Kildare 0-10 (27 points)

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