Tradition upturned! The Munster final, that storied High Mass of the hurling year shall be celebrated twice this summer. Once for the locals. Once for the rest of us. Yes, this year's All-Ireland hurling final shall be the continuation of a neighbourly squabble, another instalment in a wild Munster feud. Tipperary beat Wexford in Croke Park yesterday to qualify for a novel All-Ireland final with Clare.
The new format of the hurling championship will thus have the sternest popularity test yet. The idea of permitting the beaten finalists in the Munster and Leinster championships back into the All-Ireland series looked attractive to TV executives, sponsors and accountants when it was first mooted.
How the sight of a Tipperary team beaten roundly in the Munster final and now walking again with healed wounds and righted heads will play to the broader population remains to be seen.
Yesterday the old aristocrats of the game dispatched the reigning All-Ireland champions with a display of such surpassing confidence that it confirmed the suspicion that losing a big game tells a team more about itself than winning one does.
Tipperary made a good start scoring a goal in the first five minutes and maintaining their lead until the final whistle. They have reshaped themselves in the past few weeks as a more intensely physical side and yesterday their sturdy bustling in the middle third of the field completely disrupted the All-Ireland champions.
When Wexford showed faint signs of revival late in the game Tipperary had the resolve to dig another handful of points out of the ground. Thus it was that the swaggering residents of the self-styled `home of hurling' gatecrashed another September.
In the aftermath the Tipperary manager, Len Gaynor, a guarded critic of the new format grinned shyly like a lean Calvinist who had just won the lottery.
"We've another crack at Clare now," he smiled. "I've nothing more to say really. The system? Well sure it's there for two years and we'll abide by it. Maybe it's not so bad."
Indeed. Another crack at Clare! What the prospective final lacks in broad demographic appeal it makes up for in pure local bile. The chance to regain the bragging rights in Munster has been a driving force for Tipperary since the bruises from the provincial final healed.
The All-Ireland final should be a John B. Keane play with swinging hurleys added.
Nothing new there. Yesterday's was a game of bruising physicality sometimes spilling over into naked warfare. A near capacity crowd of 62,142 watched a game which boiled and bubbled from throw-in to final whistle. Sticks splintered and broke, ash on ash and sometimes ash on flesh and bone. The entire population of Wexford apparently shoehorned onto Hill 16, waited for their team to ignite spontaneously. It never happened. It was a bad weekend for big shots. On Saturday in Croke Park the reigning All-Ireland football champions, Meath, were beaten soundly in the Leinster final by an Offaly side who surprised many with their flair and invention. It was the first time since Offaly's win in 1982 that a side other than Dublin or Meath had won the Leinster football championship.