Four quarter-finals, three provincial champions, two favourites and one visit to Leinster House

The weekend marked a time of beginnings as well as endings, achievements and challenges for many within the GAA. This sentiment may appear to be the AI-generated opening sentence of an opinion column but it also serves as a reflection on the All-Ireland football quarter-finals.

Beginnings relate to the performances of Dublin and Kerry. There was a consensus that the destruction of Tyrone – for all the abjection of the 2021 champions’ resistance – added up to the Kerry’s best performance in the latest managerial coming of Jack O’Connor and that includes last year’s All-Ireland.

In a peculiar way, the fusion of collective energy and outstanding individual performance was rendered all the more impressive by David Clifford having, by his supreme standards, an off day.

Derry will likely be a far stiffer proposition in the semi-finals, and they did beat Cork by a greater margin than Kerry managed a month ago, but for the Ulster champions it was another lukewarm Croke Park performance.

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Dublin’s rebirth was maybe less expected but equally impressive. The attack displayed more menace than at any time during Dessie Farrell’s management and the bench added impact, a side effect of the returned players.

Mayo’s second-half collapse was also unexpected but an echo of 2019 and not just in terms of Dublin’s blitz on the resumption. Four years ago, Mayo had a draining victory over Galway in the old qualifiers before getting hammered in Killarney.

They recovered to defeat Donegal in a high-intensity, must-win face-off in Castlebar and seven days later ran into the propellers of Jim Gavin’s Dublin, who fielded reserves for a dead rubber the previous week. Mayo did well in the first half before falling away after half-time.

It’s a further reminder that teams need a break between top-end matches and proof of how expensive the Cork defeat was for Mayo, as it cost them the bye and a week off.

On a more general issue, the weekend’s matches provided context for the championship structure and the complaints that it lacked jeopardy. We can be sure that teams next year will be careful to get straight to the quarter-finals.

Of the four fixtures, three were won by provincial champions and just Monaghan of the eight preliminary quarter-finalists progressed.

The saga of GAAGO has also come to an end for this year. The remaining championship matches are all free-to-air but next week will see the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Tourism, Culture, Arts, Sport and Media shift its beady gaze to the “future of sports broadcasting”.

[ What is GAAGO and why is there controversy over GAA games? ]

Suitably emboldened by the recent savaging of hapless RTÉ delegations, politicians can be expected to indulge in further grandstanding on the GAA’s obligation to provide free television entertainment and the infantilising of older people and their supposed inability to master streaming.

The Croke Park representatives will need clear heads and strong stomachs when the focus falls on GAAGO, their joint enterprise with RTÉ. Officials have been surprisingly dilatory about sticking up for its perfectly defensible media rights allocation.

Now, thanks to the ongoing governance fiasco at Montrose, the matter has become clouded by RTÉ's current status.

And then there is the issue of Saturday’s mindless violence on Hill 16 between supporters of Armagh and Monaghan.

The GAA were, of course, correct to treat the rare misbehaviour seriously but it raised questions about the levels of intoxication involved. It also recalled youthful memories of a sign on the entrance to a hostel: “Neither alcohol nor its manifest devotees are permitted on the premises”.

While there would hardly be random breath testing at Croke Park, it would be a good idea not to allow entry to “manifest devotees” of intoxicants.

Was it a coincidence that the confrontation took place between extra-time and the penalty shoot-out? Given that one of the complaints about penalties deciding games is the old cultural arraignment that it “smacks of a foreign code”, could any malign effect spread to spectators?

Down on the field, Monaghan’s victory in the shoot-out was later accompanied by manager Vinny Corey’s denial that his players bothered to practise penalty kicks. It was a rational point of view – that netting penalties in an empty training ground little prepares anyone for the tension of a big day, a hostile crowd and the entire championship depending on the outcome.

Galway, who eliminated Armagh at the same stage of the championship last year and by the same method, took the opposite viewpoint. Manager Pádraic Joyce said that their appointed penalty takers practised every night at training.

[ Jim McGuinness: Mayo are where Dublin were in 2014 and it’s time to face the hard facts ]

Finally, it’s not known at the time of writing whether Kildare will challenge the proposed suspensions of manager Glenn Ryan for his misconduct in the preliminary quarter-final against Monaghan.

The Central Competitions Control Committee recommended two eight-week bans for comments made about referee Jerome Henry and also for entering the match officials’ dressingroom.

Ryan was widely quoted in coverage of Monaghan’s last-play winner.

“Funny enough, someone said to me this week that this man is out of his depth. And he proved tonight that he was out of his depth,” Ryan said.

“I can’t understand in a big game like that, you have a top class official like David Gough doing the line who was equally scratching his head on the line with me on occasions.”

All told, it marked quite a different attitude from the aftermath of the previous week’s win over Roscommon when Ryan praised referee Martin McNally, coincidentally from Monaghan.

“I thought it was officiated, in fairness, to the highest standard and we don’t make it easy for them, let me tell you. There were times we should be a bit more gracious on the sideline and it’s something we have to work on.”

Yes.