Monday morning draws remain a very peculiar GAA occurrence. The razzamatazz around 8.30am ball-picking affairs generates the same kind of buzz that hangs over a large field of crumpled tents in Stradbally the Monday morning after Electric Picnic. Something good happened over the weekend, but right now you just don’t have the energy or headspace for more Dizzee Rascal. No, for many households Monday morning is spent stirring their adorable rascals out of bed while simultaneously trying to pack school lunches.
In the background the radio crackles to life with a ripple of oohs and aahs, and you hear something about Mayo getting Galway. But the smell of toast burning demands your immediate attention while that great enigma which has been stumping folk since 1951 continues to go unanswered, where is the damn matching sock?
Surely these draws could take place on Sunday night. There have been opportunities in recent weeks for the Tailteann Cup draws to be completed over the weekend too, rather than delaying until Monday. It doesn’t seem to make any sense. Indeed, is there a more unsuitable time of the week than early on a Monday morning for a draw? Have the lads in Croke Park never heard of Rory McIlroy? As Dizzee might say, Bonkers. – Gordon Manning
Questionable merit to the prolonged wait for consequential championship action
Was it worth the wait? Seventy-one days after New York cut the ground from under Leitrim’s feet in the Bronx, the football championship delivered an afternoon of sustained drama and dominoes falling in unexpected ways. The championship needs stories – happy endings and tearful endings – and for more than two months they just kept showing us trailers. Just wait, they said. Isn’t that what the winter is for?
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Cork, Kildare, Donegal and Westmeath delivered performances that made the ground shake, to one degree of another. One of the spectacular outcomes is that two of the favourites for the All-Ireland, Galway and Mayo, will meet in an old fashioned shoot-out next weekend and the other three preliminary quarter-finals are too close to call.
So, does that justify the elevator music of the last 11 weeks, where so few of the games felt attractive or consequential? Will the events of Sunday afternoon soften the calls for change when a review of the new system is conducted later in the year?
We pray not. In a condensed calendar far too much time has been wasted on disposable matches in the provincial championships. Allowing that tail to wag the dog any longer would represent a catastrophic failure of judgment by the GAA. The football championship demonstrated its glorious potential on Sunday. But 77 days of waiting for a spark of summer cannot ever be repeated. – Denis Walsh
Ritual hammerings raise questions over hurling championship structure
For once the worst didn’t come to pass in Tullamore on Sunday. A really lively afternoon’s football with a grandstand finish and a long overdue piece of cheer for Kildare footballers took place in warm conditions with the sun beaming down on O’Connor Park. The threatened thunderstorms and torrential rain never materialised and it wasn’t until reaching Dublin on the way home that the skies even darkened.
Twenty-four hours earlier, it hadn’t been so sunny either literally or metaphorically when the home side, still bruised from losing the McDonagh Cup final, got taken to the chophouse by a Tipperary side disgruntled by losing their final provincial match against Waterford a fortnight ago in one of the All-Ireland preliminary quarter-finals.
All sorts of records ensued: the 7-38 to 3-18 win over Offaly was the biggest championship total ever and the aggregate was also the highest recorded. Et cetera, et cetera.
The square root of this can be found nearly six years ago in the decision of the September 2017 special congress, which introduced the provincial round-robin system. In an unscheduled intervention, Laois, Meath and Offaly proposed an amendment to allow the tier two McDonagh Cup finalists to enter the tier one Liam MacCarthy in the same year.
Despite the evident despair of the top table at the scheduling implications, it was passed. The consequent need for a preliminary All-Ireland quarter-final added a week to the schedules and has not provided much in the way of entertainment for either the participants or spectators.
It should be acknowledged that this year’s McDonagh winners, Carlow, were competitive against Dublin for a long stretch and led at half-time before losing by a double-digit margin.
Even before the weekend, the average beating handed out in these matches during the previous three years of operation was running at 0-15 – and that includes 2019 McDonagh champions Laois’s two-point win over Dublin, which had functioned to still debate about the format.
That’s no longer the case with a chorus of voices, including even some of the counties involved, increasingly questioning the value of the current structure.
The benefits of abolition would primarily be the removal of these ritual hammerings, an additional week for the MacCarthy Cup and a decent extra stretch for the McDonagh, which would no longer have to be run off in a hurry to provide teams for these preliminary quarter-finals. – Seán Moran
Bellyaching over venues unwarranted at electric Páirc Seán MacDiarmada
Enda Stenson came into the press box in Carrick-On-Shannon about 10 minutes before the throw-in of Galway v Armagh and cleared his throat. “I’d like to welcome ye to Páirc Seán Mac Diarmada,” the Leitrim county board chairman said. “And to tell ye it is a pleasure to have ye here.”
It is our sad duty to report that charmers one and all, the collected ranks of the GAA press could only grunt a kind of strangled half-thanks in response. Not because we are unmannerly wretches with no rearing in us – at least, not totally because of that. But mostly because we were caught on the hop. Mangy dogs wouldn’t be used to small kindnesses.
Páirc Seán was, it should be said, a delightful venue for such a tectonic encounter. With a crowd of 6,803 present, it was exactly the sort of provincial venue that these games ought to be taking place in. There was still plenty of room on the terraces too, which made a bit of a mockery of whatever bellyaching Armagh supporters had been doing about not getting the game played in Croke Park.
“They sent them down here, for some unknown reason,” groused Kieran McGeeney. “And look, it’s nothing against Leitrim – they’ve been very accommodating to Armagh, brilliant people, they looked after us really well. But you would have thought that we could definitely have filled other places. I’ve given up years ago trying to understand the CCCC.”
McGeeney has far more admirers than he’d generally like to allow himself to think he has but this was a bum note. Carrick is equidistant from Armagh city and Galway city, it’s a brilliant town for a bit of pregame yakking and yukking and the atmosphere down the stretch yesterday when the teams wired into each other was completely electric. None of that would have been the case in a quarter-full Croke Park. – Malachy Clerkin
Bumper championship weekends put the squeeze on page space
We were somewhere out the road from Omagh on Saturday evening when word came through that Andrew Coscoran ran the fastest ever Irish 1,500 metres, indoors or out.
Not that it was necessarily disputed, but his winning time at the Nice Continental Tour of 3:32.68 smashed the 3:33.49 he ran at the World Indoor Tour meeting in Birmingham back in February, at the time just about the fastest Irish 1,500m.
The previous outdoor mark was one the longest-standing records in Irish athletics, Ray Flynn’s 3:33.5 going back 41 years, clocked during the Dream Mile run in Oslo back in July 1982.
Coscoran is now out on his own, his supreme effort perhaps lost a little in the mayhem of another bumper weekend of GAA coverage, particularly on the football front. Given the number of games on the Sunday it’s no surprise his record only made the small briefs on the back of this newspaper.
Much has already been written about the pros and cons of the condensed GAA season, and how much media coverage it may or may not be missing out on as some of the big games go up against the tail end of the football and rugby seasons. The condensed season is also putting a squeeze on media coverage of other sports.
The National Track and Field Championships, for example, will for the first time in my memory take place on the same weekend as the All-Ireland football final. Now, the presence of Rhasidat Adeleke will unquestionably bring some attention, but for the sport of athletics that’s a clash it could probably do without.
Back when the All-Ireland football final was on the third Sunday in September, there was some dismay in our house back in 2000, when it clashed with the Sydney Olympics, given our dad was away covering that – the first All-Ireland football final he’d miss in maybe 30 years.
To his considerable relief, that final ended in a draw, which meant he was home in time to see Kerry beat Galway in the replay, that game played on October 7th. I can only imagine his frustration now at the final being played on the same weekend as the track and field championships. Something will miss out. Unless of course it goes to a replay. – Ian O’Riordan
