With the submission of the final scorecard last week the season is officially at an end.

The bare statistics show that 809 matches were scheduled in the season of which just over 85% took place [weather and walk-overs having taken their toll].

The Championship winners were well distributed with no less than 14 clubs having teams ascending the podium as winners. Merrion and Bagenalstown were the two clubs with double winners. Below the top two Divisions, where all the teams are the 1st XI of their clubs, seven of the leagues were won by 1st XIs. Of particular note is the success of Longford, Castleknock and Bagenalstown in D5 - D7.

The breakdown in terms of promotions / relegations is set out in the table below - but it is important to remember that this represents only the occupation of the relevant positions in the various league tables. This is only one of many factors [the number of teams entered for competitions in 2018, the bar on a club having two teams in the same league, the size of individual leagues, requests from clubs to drop leagues as a result of a loss of players over the winter and so on] that must be taken into account by the OCC in deciding league structures for next year.

It has been a good league campaign for Bagenalstown which has three teams in promotion spots, Adamstown, Clontarf and Merrion are also likely to be happy with the overall results*. Looking at the overall picture there are more 1st XIs making their way up the leagues than are going down. 

One final question we might consider is how competitive the leagues were. To do this we look at the % of points that the winning team achieved at the end of the season [converting D1/D2 to %]. Two teams won their divisions with 0ver 90% of the possible points - Merrion in D2 and AIB in D14. There were two other dominant teams with over 80% - Halverstown, who had exactly 80% in D13 and DU II in D9. The remaining leagues were equally split between teams with winning percentages in the 60s and 70s.

For anyone interesting in seeing the full tables on a single page - click here.

*For the purpose of this exercise, in seven team leagues only the last place is included as a relegation spot.