January is about starting, not winning

On Gaelic Games:Beginning the year with the secondary provincial competitions is a good way of combining match practice with training

THERE’S A particular atmosphere at intercounty matches in January. Unusually for the GAA there is a pervasive mood of nothing much being at stake. The odd fixture attracts a big crowd, as a result of neighbouring rivalries or the appointment of a big-name manager but that is the exception.

In 2006 Armagh and Tyrone, having made the previous year’s championship an arena of their own in which they contested a replayed Ulster final and an All-Ireland semi-final, drew around 20,000 to Casement Park at the end of January for a McKenna Cup final simply on the back of their extraordinary rivalry at the time.

The province was abuzz, having won three of the previous four All-Irelands and already that month 11,000 had travelled to Ballybofey for the Armagh-Donegal match.

In the real world, however, pre-season tournaments may be a popular antidote to cabin fever but no one travels in January with a knot in their stomach and eaten by anxiety about the outcome.

Reactions to whatever result unfolds don’t vary hugely. It’s great either to get good, competitive games or to see the younger lads getting a run. Great feats can be performed, solemnly noted and forgotten by March once the real business of the season takes hold.

It’s surprising to hear the amount of comment passed on the ins and outs of the close season and the training ban and the priority pick colleges have of interplayers because January is a month for coming to terms with what’s ahead and sifting through what’s available – all in the context of the National Leagues starting a few weeks later.

Although those opposed to the training ban say it’s bad for players to have to play competitions without proper pre-season training, this point of view misses the fact that the January of the O’Byrne Cup, McKenna Cup etcetera is the pre-season.

Managers reaching the later stages of these tournaments are more likely to speak of their satisfaction at getting a good few matches under their belts rather than of an earnest ambition to win the title.

No one gets worked about losing and the presence of Dublin, Offaly, Meath and Laois in the weekend’s O’Byrne Shield semi-finals illustrates the point. Between them they have won 49 of the past 53 senior Leinster titles. Clearly they don’t regard the O’Byrne Cup as a season-defining enterprise.

And that’s right. Beginning the year with the secondary provincial competitions is a good way of combining match practice with training. If the various results have any indicative value it’s mostly of the negative kind. Only one team wins an All-Ireland every year so it’s not the exclusive definition of a satisfactory season but for what it’s worth whoever wins out in the provinces is unlikely to be organising an open-top bus in September.

In 60 years of O’Byrne Cup football, only Dublin in 1958 and Meath in 1967 have added the Sam Maguire in the same year and it’s a similarly bleak correlation elsewhere. The Dr McKenna Cup has been won by eventual All-Ireland champions on only four occasions, Cavan (1951), Down (1961), Derry (1993) and Tyrone (2005) since the 1920s.

Munster’s McGrath Cup was only revived in 1981 (by Joe McGrath, the Down man who settled in Cork and managed their footballers as opposed to PJ McGrath from Fethard who launched the original in the 1940s) and has never been won by a team that went on to All-Ireland success in the same year, a litany of failure qualified by the fact it was exclusively for the weaker football counties in the province for much of its existence.

Only in Connacht, where the provincial league was started as late as 1997, has the hit rate been notably higher, if only by virtue of Galway picking it up in both of their recent big years, 1998 and 2001.

Ambling into Drogheda’s GAA Grounds on Sunday all the usual elements were in place: a modest but vaguely interested crowd and two teams merely at the start of what will be a long road, regardless of where it ends.

Louth have made it their business in recent times to make an effort in the O’Byrne Cup and have reached the last two finals. Manager Peter Fitzpatrick sounded happy to be doing so once again. But it must be taxing even his brisk enthusiasm to go back to the start of another year having left so much behind in 2010 by so agonisingly small a margin.

Accepting that the fiasco of last July’s Leinster final has indeed been put behind them, there is the additional burden of the revisited curse of emigration now once again stalking the country, eroding confidence and undermining communities, including clubs and county teams.

Three players from last year’s first team have departed and must be replaced. Fitzpatrick is all the happier for the opportunities to road-test replacements.

He doesn’t mind playing college teams, given they’re sharp in the lead-up to the Sigerson Cup and – although he acknowledges the rule doesn’t affect him much this year – unconcerned by the first call they have on intercounty players. And he’s not too proud to say that he always takes the O’Byrne Cup seriously.

Mick O’Dwyer is different. He may have an agenda but it has always been about as hidden as the Eiffel Tower. How anyone retains the effervescent enthusiasm for intercounty management that he routinely displays is at least as remarkable as his lifetime achievements.

Some managers when accosted by the suggestion they’re not looking heartbroken by defeat can get huffy or feign devastation but Micko has a manifesto that he’s always happy to share.

“I didn’t mind about losing it at all,” he cheerfully told his inquisitors, most of whom were just back in training themselves. “Our performance in the second half was exceptionally good and I was delighted with that. We were very hesitant in the first half so we made a few changes and jigged our team around a bit and that helped. It’s all about experimenting at this time of year. There’s only the one competition that matters in the GAA and I don’t have to tell you what it is.”

Of course he’s right but given the unlikelihood of Wicklow winning a Leinster or All-Ireland title, mightn’t it be worthwhile to rack up the odd O’Byrne Cup or divisional title or even promotion? He doesn’t see it that way, reserving league and other subsidiary ostentation for the first year of his various tenures around the country.

In the cold, brittle sunlight, the heat and tension of summer seem a lifetime away but everything starts somewhere and regardless of what meaning – if any – its January lessons ever come to represent, 2011 is under way.

smoran@irishtimes.com