The future viability of the O’Byrne Cup and the other pre-season football competitions are up for debate again this week, after Kildare and Louth both withdrew from their respective dead rubber fixtures last night.
The place of these competitions in the calendar is always subject to scrutiny – scrutiny that has a new edge with the revamped football championship structure we will see unfolding over the course of the next six months.
I see a different future for these competitions to others. I have a feeling these pre-season competitions will become more important than they’ve ever been, particularly to new managers, over the course of the next five years.
The league now shapes your championship fortunes. If you’re in Division 3 or Division 2, then what you do in those seven league games will determine whether you play in the Sam Maguire or Tailteann Cup that summer.
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The idea that your first competitive game in charge as a new manager of a Division 3 team could ultimately define your entire season is a lot of pressure to put on a game at the end of January. Standing on that sideline for the first time is daunting enough – doing it in a FBD league game is surely preferable to doing it for real, with the potential for your whole season to hinge on it.
No, I have a funny feeling that these competitions have a way to go yet. But we need to talk about the Walsh Cup and the Munster Hurling League, and more importantly the hurling league for which these pre-season competitions are supposed to act as preparation.
The McKenna Cup is important, if only because Derry, Down and Fermanagh have to be ready to go for the first round of the league. What exactly did Waterford and Tipperary get out of their Munster league game last Tuesday night week, other than a couple of nice pictures of Davy Fitzgerald and Liam Cahill?
In the storm of criticism – much of it from hurling pundits – that rained down on the GAA at various stages of the summer last year for condensing the championships, not one person suggested getting rid of the competition that takes up almost as much time as any other, while offering us basically nothing . . . namely, the National Hurling League.
Looked at a certain way, the Munster Hurling League has more going for it than the National Hurling League. It is, at least, not fooling anyone. No one in Mallow for Waterford/Tipperary was under any illusions that this meant anything.
When the National Hurling League starts in February, it will certainly have the appearance of an actual sporting competition, but the closer you look, the more you realise you’re watching a sham.
“Lookit, it’s just the league” might as well have been the tagline of the competition for the last 30 years or more, but it’s true now more than ever. Since the 2020 league, when a broadly similar number of strong teams and weak teams were put in each half of Division 1 – meaning that for any of the big guns, avoiding relegation basically came down to beating Antrim, Laois or Westmeath and then water-skiing their way through the rest of the competition if they so desired – the league has been a farce.
I would have taken the opponents of the split season on RTÉ television last summer much more seriously if they had come up with a more coherent argument for what to do with the six or seven months the intercounty game has been given in the new calendar.
So, how about you hold onto the Munster Hurling League and the Walsh Cup . . . I’m not a monster, after all. Then you give the Fitzgibbon Cup a month on its own, with a chance to try and grow its audience, and with an opportunity for intercounty players to actually commit to it, instead of trying to avoid injury between games on a Wednesday with their college and games with their counties on the weekend.
If that takes you to nearly the end of February, the question then needs to be: how do we find the best team in Ireland between March and July? What’s the most exciting, fairest, most challenging way to get from 12 teams to one, and what part does the league play in all that?
You could tie the league to the championship, as is now being done in football, or you could just scrap it altogether, and play the Munster and Leinster championships as home and away leagues, with seeding for a knock-out championship based on that. Hurling has always been anxious to untether itself from football, so having a league that matters just because football has one is not a good enough reason, quite frankly.
There are 21 weekends between the start of March and the date of the All-Ireland senior hurling final in 2023. Giving any of those weekends over to a competition the teams don’t care about seems like a bit of a waste. The Walsh Cup and the Munster Hurling League are pre-season tournaments that are treated like pre-season tournaments. That’s fair enough. But the serious stuff doesn’t start for quite a while after that – so let’s see if we can do better.
