TOM HUMPHRIESidentifies the teams with momentum as the real business of the championship beckons

The Big Winners

THE LEAGUE giveth and the league taketh away. The progress of teams can only be measured on any given Sunday evening against what they set out to do. As such it is a delicate business. A series of trials played out under the eye of a ticking clock. You can start off experimenting like a flower child but by the time the evenings lengthen you need to be settling.

For four weekends it was to Dublin the league gave the most. The transition work which Pat Gilroy was undertaking was rewarded with an unlikely series of wins. Then the league took away. Two defeats and the cavils of the faithful were heard in chorus. In Healy Park tomorrow Dublin continue to examine the options. The two O’Carrolls, Paul Conlon, Cian O’Sullivan, start in defence for instance. That sort of turnover of personnel has been a theme of the blue spring.

Summer will determine the value of Dublin’s campaign but four or five viable new starters would represent success. Midfield remains the biggest worry however. The good flashes from Eamon Fennell and Michael McCauley haven’t been numerous enough to make the headache go away but elsewhere Dublin are turning up enough fresh faces to perhaps alter the brittle mindset of the established collective.

Tyrone? There was dark talk early on of their scrappage value. The team of the noughties were beaten dockets. In a series of bad days the most traumatic moment perhaps was the loss to Galway but even that came wrapped around a silver lining. Seán Cavanagh returned. Next day they pipped Kerry. Maybe they have dropped back, but not as quickly as most of Ulster has.

Only Down and Antrim seem to be moving on up. And the evidence is that Tyrone’s momentum is forward again.

Cork’s league has been a confirmation of what Cork and just about everybody else knew. This looks like a team on the cusp. Their size, their focus, their distinctive style make them compelling. Conor Counihan has a platoon rather than a panel at his disposal and can afford to make nine changes for Sunday’s game with Mayo and still look intimidatingly strong. They score freely. They concede almost as freely. A work-in-progress but quite advanced progress. It has to be so. A youngish panel are clad to an ageing base (messrs Canty, Quirke, Lynch and Murphy) and the window for transforming yourself from being ranked as the next big thing to being All-Ireland champions is a small one.

Mayo? John O’Mahony’s touch hasn’t deserted him after all. Regardless of what happens against Cork tomorrow, Mayo are a success story this spring. Aidan O’Shea has worked through a difficult patch. Seamus O’Shea looks the real deal at midfield. Under 21s like Alan Freeman, Kevin McLoughlin and Castlebar’s Neil Douglas are bubbling through in a side which drips with attacking options.

Elsewhere the success story of the spring has to be James McCartan in Down. The county have secured their second promotion on the trot, outscoring and outdefending every team in Division Two and laying down markers everywhere they went. Ambrose Rodgers’s restoration to full health has been a joy in itself. His form makes his rehabilitation even more worthy of celebration. Up front, Paul McComiskey and Marty Clarke have reduced the dependence on Benny Coulter. The defence is tight and the form of Kalum King at midfield in Dan Gordon’s absence has surprised many. A team to watch come summer.

The Big Losers

Well, losers is a term which requires qualification and modification when used in connection with the National Football League.

Relegation from the top flight is about the worst that can befall the hapless aristocrat and even that isn’t so bad.

Division Two is a respectable locale from which to launch a championship campaign. Beyond that the badlands of the lower divisions offer the cover of a witness protection programme for teams looking to reconstruct their lives.

Top table first. The league bestows various degrees of contentment on those who appear to thrive. Provided things go okay against Monaghan tomorrow, Kerry will lose no sleep over a campaign which gave vital stage time to a few understudies.

A last kick of the game defeat to Tyrone will have left only superficial wounds. League fare between the two counties is a flimsy ersatz version of the real thing. Kerry would lose like that every week to Tyrone for the pleasure of giving Mickey Harte’s team one good championship spanking. The impression leaking out of Kerry is that after the team’s immense success of the last decade this is a gap year.

Right!

Worries presently are the thoughts and intentions of Mike McCarthy, the slowness to learn of Aidan O’Mahoney and the broken thumb of David Moran. Things could be worse in the Kingdom but they could be a whole lot better too.

Monaghan’s four points to date have come at the expense of Derry and Tyrone. Which in any other season would be like having eight points, your birthday and Christmas all rolled into one. Banty McEnaney set the stall out with particular feistiness however, regularly asserting Monaghan’s rights and expectations vis-a-vis Division One status.

For anybody who relished the gung-ho style of their win over Tyrone in Iniskeen last month, there is a sadness in seeing them so vulnerable tomorrow. Monaghan have been knocking around for quite some time now threatening to do something big and memorable. They have the personnel and they have the manager. This league should have been a platform.

Alas poor Derry. The campaign started happily with a win over Tyrone and as league champions in 2008 and runners-up last year Derry had a right to great expectations. Things have been forlorn ever since however and those two points were the last which Derry picked up. Tomorrow it looks like Eoin Bradley will join Paddy Bradley in the infirmary leaving a lot of pressure on the Kielt brothers, James and Charles, to give Derry a slender chance.

Further down the food chain, take a look at Westmeath. Dropping like a stone in a well. Thirteen league defeats on the trot have taken them on the express lift from Division One to Division Three at such speed that they are more prone to injury from the G- force than on the pitch.

They will be joined down there surprisingly by Tipperary. Under the guidance of John Evans, Tipperary football gives the distinct impression of moving up even as it slides back.

The Munster under-21 triumph will mask the disappointment of a relegation after two years of successive promotions which brought Tipp from Division Four.

Spare a thought lastly for the footballers of Kilkenny. Unloved and unheralded in Hurling Central they have gone out and taken their lumps week in week out. The wins and draws columns are empty.

They have scored 5-22 and conceded 22-118, a difference of -147 spread over seven games. There is something heroic about their persistence and pride.

The Next Big Things

The leagues are a petri dish for testing what young talents counties have or for confirming the impression which a player made in brief the previous summer.

With so many marquee names content to sit back and contemplate their navels for the winter, the leagues are one long search for the X Factor.

Or not.

Nothing damns a young talent more than being branded a winter league player, a dray horse for the mucky days but not to be used when the ground is hard and the boys of summer go flying around.

This winter has seen the quiet progress of Enda Varley. A sub on the Mayo All-Ireland U-21 team of 2006, Varley has been a slow burner in the interim period. In a county where hope often raises ahead of reason this has probably been a good thing.

He had another year at under-21 to serve and then lost some time to injuries. In the meanwhile he was learning his trade at Sigerson level with University of Limerick and has emerged this winter as Mayo’s top scorer in the league.

In Meath the league has seen the full emergence into the spotlight of Jamie Queeney, yet another forward talent. Meath have so much potential in their forwards they must pine for the days when the county produced a conveyor belt of hard, hard backs Lyons, Harnan, Coyle et al.

Queeney graduated from the U-21s in 2007 and didn’t set the world alight for a while. Last summer he was a bit player who looked more promising with every appearance.

This winter he has nailed down a place. What that place will be is anybody’s guess. He can play full forward and has a happy knack with goals but many Royals fancy their Queeney as a wing forward. A bonus is his dead ball kicking which relieves the reliance on the mercurial Cian Ward.

Elsewhere, Michael Murphy continues to haul Donegal along on his slender back. CJ McGourty’s haste in getting back into an Antrim jersey after the club All-Ireland will have quietened some of his critics and promises good things for Antrim come the summer. In Roscommon Donie Shine’s excellence has run all winter against the grain of a floundering side.

Monaghan’s Conor McManus exudes the confidence of a natural football and come summer the burden which has rested on Tomas Freeman’s shoulders for some years will be lightened.

Club champions tend to make their contribution to the county team a year of two after they achieve success. The excellent Hugh Gill and Paul Conlon of St Vincent’s who, as corner backs on the All-Ireland-winning 2008 team, curbed every threat they met are in the shake-up for blue jerseys. Ahead of them probably is Cian O’Sullivan, the cream of the crop in Kilmacud’s fine 2009 winning team.

O’Sullivan is the sort of smart footballing half back Dublin have been looking for and if he can keep the head up when distributing he will be a name this summer. Behind him, his clubmates the O’Carroll brothers (abducted some would claim from hurling) look likely to form two- thirds of the Dublin full back line.

Natural defenders, tall, strong and smart; seducing them may turn out to be manager Pat Gilroy’s greatest deed so far.

In the superpower counties, two escapees from Circular Quay or wherever they fetched up in Australia will continue to attract interest. Kyle Coney’s departure from Tyrone was lamented all over the county but none keened louder than Mickey Harte. Back after a brief sojourn, Coney is the class act of the recent underage graduates and if Tyrone are entering transition (a prospect much exaggerated one suspects) he will emerge on the other side as a leader of the next generation.

And in Kerry the departure of Tommy Walsh and Tadhg Kenneally for Aussie Rules were setbacks but not of the magnitude that Mike McCarthy’s retirement (when confirmed) will be. Walsh’s breakthrough year had come at a time when Kieran Donaghy was in the repair shop for practically the entire summer. A fully restored Donaghy offsets the loss neatly.

Or more interest will be what David Moran produces this summer. Rejected by the Aussies after a two-week holiday-cum-trial, Moran has the ball skills and the athleticism and of course the pedigree to be a star. At times during the league campaign he has turned the business of “not being afraid to miss” into something worthy of a medal for valour but his running and physical strength have been evident. Broke his thumb in Portugal last week trying to block down Paul Galvin. Hopefully his absence will be brief.