Multiple things can be true at the same time. The provincial championships can be a dead loss, a nonsense tear in the fabric of true competition, a classic Irish solution to an invented Irish problem. They can also be a damn good day out.
Over the past two weekends, crowds in Ennis, in the Bronx, in Castlebar and in Omagh have gone home humming because of results that lit a fire under the championship. These were games that rocked and rolled across three provinces and two continents and every one of them had just a kick of a ball between the sides heading into the final 10 minutes. Every one of them was celebrated with appropriate braying and harooing in the stands.
There are a few reasons for this. For a start, race memory is a powerful force. The small band of weary followers who’ve kept the faith in Clare football down the decades couldn’t care less that Cork are a faded force now. Every one of them grew up knowing that if a summer death didn’t come in green and gold, it would definitely come in red and white.
The provincial championships have battered and bludgeoned Clare football for generations. If and when the four towers are eventually detonated for good, nobody will be closer to the front of the queue to push down the plunger than Clare football people. And yet they jumped and hugged and pumped their fists in Cusack Park when Cillian Rouine popped over the winner on Easter Sunday because the years leave their mark.
Proximity has its say too. Beating the shower who always beat you has its own resonance, built up over a long period of facing off against them. Roscommon and Monaghan have eerily similar relationships to Mayo and Tyrone respectively. Both will always feel they have a shot at taking down their more illustrious neighbours in a one-off game. Just as Mayo and Tyrone will be confident of dealing with them if it comes to the crunch later on down the line.
[ Ambitious Monaghan find ruthless streak when in mattersOpens in new window ]
The case of New York is a little different, obviously. But the Connacht Championship is all they’ve ever known. Or to put it more accurately, losing in the Connacht Championship is all they’ve ever known. For a quarter of a century, they’ve welcomed the championship to Gaelic Park, taken their beating and opened the bar. The end of that run, whenever and however it came, was always going to get the confetti cannons firing.
None of which means that the provincial championships are suddenly a great thing. We can all rhyme off the flaws in the system in our sleep. The Rossies’s reward for beating Mayo comes this Sunday against Galway, which would be a dubious enough payout in a normal year. But it’s possibly worth even less on the dollar in 2023.
It means Roscommon have to win this weekend in the Hyde, otherwise they will begin their All-Ireland round robin series with an away match against one of the provincial champions. In all likelihood, that pencils in a trip to Killarney, Croke Park, Salthill or somewhere in Ulster to kick off their Sam Maguire matches. Which, by the way, is going to be Mayo’s fate too. So all that push and pull in Castlebar was for what, exactly?
Same with whoever is defeated in the Monaghan v Derry game in a fortnight. The miles-long stretch of jubilant Monaghan cars heading back through Aughnacloy and Emyvale on Sunday could only enjoy the win for what it was on the day. Lose to Derry and they’ll be in the same seeding group as Tyrone when the draw is made in a few weeks – Pot 3 will most likely be Mayo, Tyrone, Galway/Roscommon and Derry/Monaghan. Ryan O’Toole’s heroball injury-time goal counts for very little in the scheme of things.
The fact that the consequences for winning and losing aren’t so different from each other could well be having its own effect on these games. The 2-17 to 1-18 scoreline in Omagh meant that this was the highest-scoring Ulster Championship match ever between Monaghan and Tyrone. If they meet again in an All-Ireland quarter-final, will they be quite so full of derring-do? Everything will be on the line then in a way that just wasn’t the case on Sunday.
And yet, and yet. None of the winning teams or their supporters these past two weekends would hand back the results even if they could. The ultimate fate of these teams and their respective 2023 championships is a far-off, amorphous thing. All that mattered on the day was getting it done. All that was in anyone’s heads as the clock ran down was fighting off the lactic acid, straining for the next ball, desperately clawing for the result. The game itself was the only imperative.
It will be interesting to watch how long this sort of eyeballs-out commitment goes on for. This being the first year of the new championship – and indeed the first weeks of it – means that nobody really knows enough yet to risk getting cute. The game is there to be played and so the game is there to be won, at least for now.
But it doesn’t take a degree in physiology to see that Tyrone and Monaghan players were falling down with cramp everywhere you looked in Omagh as the game wore into its 78th minute, while their counterparts in Kerry and Dublin were at home on the couch. Structural imbalance is still written into the DNA of the competition, handing a clear advantage to the two counties least in need of it.
It could well be, therefore, that we need to enjoy this interlude of highly entertaining provincial matches while they last. The reality of modern sport is that they are an inefficiency that will likely be squeezed from the system before too long.
