There are four games left of this extraordinary, ground-breaking GAA summer, and the consensus, of course, has been ‘Football, God Help Us’. And it’s true, that as we look ahead to this weekend’s semi-finals there is an air of inevitability about the final result.
Last autumn, Dublin beat Monaghan and Tyrone by a combined total of 22 points in an All-Ireland quarter-final and semi-final, and Galway still hadn’t played a game of Division 1 football under Kevin Walsh.
I tipped Mayo to win the All-Ireland final last September, and it felt like I was tipping Ali to beat Foreman in Zaire. When you think of all the wins that Mayo team had under their belt, it didn’t seem like that much of a gamble… and yet, in one’s heart of hearts, you couldn’t really make a water-tight argument for that Mayo team on purely footballing grounds. So where does that leave us this year? Even further from a shock, you would think.
It’s hard to quantify just what kind of impact having a team like Dublin in a championship actually has. We’ve had the example in the recent past of Kilkenny in the hurling championship, and back then no game, even in the Munster championship, really escaped the orbit of Kilkenny’s influence. You were never allowed play just the opposition in front of you. Even if you won, the question more often than not was – “it was good enough today, but will it be good enough to beat Kilkenny?”
And it’s worth reminding ourselves that when we talk about the successes and failures of the new provincial round-robins in hurling, and the All-Ireland quarter-final group stages in football. To paraphrase Harold McMillan, it’s important to remember what really makes a successful championship structure – teams, dear boy, teams.
Hurling has had a banner year, the greatest championship of them all. But take it back to the start of the decade and bring in the changes then. How different would our summer have been? In 2010, Kilkenny were going for their five in a row – what the bloody hell is the point of having them play four games in a round-robin, followed by a final, to tell us what we already know?
Limerick were fielding a second-string team due to a players’ strike, so what was the point in having them get four hammerings in a Munster championship, when one would have been enough to put them out of their misery?
That championship finished with Tipperary the champions, but it felt, even after Tipp’s first round Munster championship defeat to Cork that year, that everything was a pre-cursor to a Kilkenny/Tipperary final. The round-robins might have felt like a needlessly long answer to a pretty short question.
The most thrilling part of this hurling season has been the lack of respect shown by teams to their opponents (in the best possible sense), and even to the match circumstances. Nine points is a dangerous lead in hurling, as Michael Duignan would say. No one accepted before a game began, or even after a rocky opening 20 minutes, that the result was pre-ordained. After years of Kilkenny domination (even of games they weren’t directly involved in), it’s right for us to luxuriate in that for a summer.
It's hardly Dublin's fault, and if they go on to win their county's first ever four-in-a-row, they'll be rightly saluted
Who would have been in the football Super 8s in 2010? Cork ended that year as All-Ireland champions, beating Down in the final. Kildare were the width of a crossbar away from beating Down in the semi-final. Kerry were the title-holders, the Dubs were agonisingly short of champion standard, and Tyrone were magnificent Ulster champions that year.
But there was no one behemoth side, no one team that it was deemed impossible to catch. It is no guarantee of a brilliant championship, but it’s a fair bet to say that summer (right up until maybe the greatest hurling final of all time!) might have been more about the big ball than the small ball.
It’s hardly Dublin’s fault, and if they go on to win their county’s first ever four-in-a-row, they’ll be rightly saluted. But their mere presence in the background colours how teams play, how they set up, and ultimately how excited they get about going on a run. It was good enough today, but will it be good enough to beat the Dubs?
It might be pertinent to mention, for those suggesting this dominance will continue unabated, that the Dublin footballers have already taken part in a provincial round-robin of their own this year… at minor level, where they lost to both Meath and Wicklow, and failed to progress to the semi-finals. Their current level of domination might look eternal, but these things never are.
What we can take from this summer is the certainty that the Munster hurling championship will not always be this evenly matched, and that making the best teams in football play against each other more often is a fairer way of deciding who becomes All-Ireland champions. Structures can only do so much.
