Which are the strongest teams in the country and how have they fared over the past few years. Paul Reynolds' recent article goes a long way towards answering this question, employing a complex algorithm adapted from the way in which the ranking of international teams are carried out.
But clubs are more than their first teams. Is there any way of gauging the performance of clubs over time? The answer is probably in the negative but that hasn't stopped us from giving it a go. Taking the top three teams in a club [the answer to our question cannot be determined simply by the size of the club] we provide a simple ranking [no complex calculations here] based on their position across the leagues. So for example Clontarf [winners of the D1 in 2016] are ranked 1 and Cork County [winners of D2] are 9. We then simply add up the ranking for the three teams in a club and the clubs with the fewer points rank highest. On this basis the best a club could achieve [in current structure] would be 43 by topping D1, D3 and D4.
The chart below gives us an indication [no more than that] of a club’s relative performance over the past five years based on their top three teams in Open Competitions. This ignores many things - including youth and women’s cricket - but this is intended only as a simple quantitative measurement. The chart looks at clubs with three OC teams over the past five years.
The above should be seen as a light hearted and non-scientific table - at best an indicator of how the main teams in the club are performing over time and how clubs compare to their peers.