The revolution begins in Ballinamore, Co Leitrim. And not for the first time, either.
In 1256AD, the Battle of Magh Slécht took place up around there. It was between the O’Rourkes and the O’Reillys, a key inflection point in the break-up of the Kingdom of Breifne. This was a while before Joe Brolly was calling Cavan football the Black Death but everything comes full circle eventually.
“Then rose up the Connachtmen on the other side of the battle,” trills the account in the Annals of Connacht of the Battle of Magh Slécht.
“And a comely, quick, hot and hasty company were they. They ranged themselves in a burning, blazing, active, fiery throng, a phalanx stout and stable. A fierce furious felling fight was joined then between the two hosts.”
So now. The guts of 800 years later, we turn our eyes to Leitrim and Laois as they range themselves for battle. The felling fight to be joined is the opening fixture in Division Three of the 2025 National Football League but we all know it’s a little more than that as well.
At two o’clock on a Saturday afternoon, Páirc Seán Heslin hosts the first competitive game under the new rules brought in on the back of work by the Football Review Committee. And from here, or so goes the hope, the old game will be jolted into a world of all those urgent descriptors. Bring on the burning, blazing, active, fiery throngs.
Ultimately, that’s what this is all for. When Jim Gavin talks about making Gaelic football “the most enjoyable amateur sport in the world to play and watch”, this is the stuff. A little less of the stout and stable phalanxes, thanks. A whole lot more of the quick, hot and hasty company.
It would be silly to imagine that all the rules will work from the start – or indeed that some of them will work at all. Already, something like the aggressively Corinthian notion of handing the ball to your fouled opponent feels a little unlikely to survive the spring. Too open to interpretation for one thing, too needlessly submissive for another.
These first few weeks, we’re going to be living in the weeds of it all. So many nutty, granular questions. What happens if a player hands the ball back and his opponent drives into him with a solo-and-go as he’s doing it? Will a backroom member get away with shouting abuse at a linesman if he’s sitting in the crowd rather than on the bench? How do we write down a bloody scoreline anymore?
But these are all just details. They matter, yes. And they are what the lion’s share of the initial giving out will be about, which is both understandable and healthy. But they’re not the main thing. Too much focus on the picayune concerns around the fringes will mean we lose sight of the reasons this had to happen in the first place.
Football had become drudgery. An object of derision, really. A sport that means so much to such a huge chunk of the population had curdled into something that was difficult to defend in polite society. The decline happened in front of us all, right there in plain sight, with plenty of people shouting stop but nobody empowered to do anything to change it.
So in a way, it’s quietly thrilling to be here, now, for a genuine Year Zero. To witness a sport as it tries to reimagine itself while staying true to itself at the same time. Maybe that’s impossible, a doomed attempt to align two contradictory goals. But at least they’re giving it a go.
In so doing, they’ve automatically infused the 2025 league with intrigue, curiosity and edge. For the next nine weeks, the 32 teams are like the contestants in the first season of Big Brother. The game is there for them to play in whatever way they see fit, within the artificial strictures dreamed up by the producers. In time, the accepted way to go about it will become clear. But right now, they don’t yet know what they don’t yet know.
Who will win? If Gavin and his band of merry men are correct, the race will go to the swift and the battle to the strong. In their selling of it, they insist that the game is still football and that matches will be won by the teams with the best players playing the best football, rather than those with the most effective systems designed to stifle it.
That’s probably a bit utopian just yet – there’s a fair chance that the initial gains will be made by the teams who adapt quickest to the rules and aren’t constantly coughing up 50-metre punishments. But on the face of it, this looks like a sport that rewards quick thinking, adventurous kicking, speed across the turf and accuracy in front of goal.
So . . . Kerry then? The Dubs? Donegal? Armagh? The other four in the top flight?
Division One is a pin-sticker’s choice, in all honesty. Anyone who wants to be dogmatic about outcomes between teams they haven’t seen, playing a sport they’ve barely watched, on the weekend after a once-in-a-generation storm has ravished the land – well, there’s a chance they might just be spoofing.
Oddly, for such a landmark weekend, the GAA haven’t cleared the decks.
Given how meticulous and stage-managed everything has been since the FRC began their work, you would have imagined the football league would have the opening intercounty weekend to itself. You would have been wrong. The hurling league starts this January Saturday as well.
It has undergone some changes too. The format has a more tightened look about it, with a spoonful of jeopardy added in and no opportunity for teams in Division 1B to progress to the knock-out stages. Quite what size of spoon has been used will take a while to reveal itself – promotion and relegation are still only as serious as the counties decide they are.
What can be said with some certainty though is that the year begins with no obvious big beast roaming the land. Everyone expects Limerick to come roaring back but without Nickie Quaid, most teams will fancy a cut off them. The last time they lost a knock-out championship match, they came back and won four All-Irelands in a row. They are menacing but vulnerable, like Omar in The Wire.
Clare are All-Ireland champions and probably still have room to grow but they’re nobody’s idea of a dominant force yet. Cork can beat anyone but it’s a long time since they beat everyone. Kilkenny, Galway, Tipperary, Waterford – they’re all retooling on the fly. Mostly, they all know in their bones that none of this truly matters until Easter weekend.
And so the hurling league will come and go in the usual way, its footprints a little heavier on the sand this time around but still to be washed away as soon the championship tide comes in.
Waterford and Dublin will strain at the leash to get out of Division 1B, Wexford look doomed in 1A before a ball has been pucked. Between Tipp and Galway to join them, maybe? Sunday in Salthill could be the decider there.
We won’t know what it all means until further down the road, possibly as far away as this time next year. Even with the format change, league hurling is still a kind of a Rorschach Test – every team comes at it from a different perspective and each will emerge on the other side of it with their own circumstances reflected. Success and failure are judged a thousand different ways in the league. Life gets a lot more binary come championship.
That’s true of football as well, particularly at the sharper end of things in Division One. But some animals remain more equal than others too. Down the divisions, the league is a living, meaningful competition with real consequences. Spare a thought, then, for the 16 teams in Divisions Two and Three.
All of them start the league knowing that their participation in the Sam Maguire and/or Tailteann Cup is liable to come down to how well they learn these rules and how disciplined they are at staying on the right side of them. The FRC were clearly correct in insisting the rules be trialled at the highest level, rather than the fudge of college or underage tournaments. But it’s a lot for these counties to be putting on the line, in the name of the common good.
Then again, that’s what broadly we want, isn’t it? A sport that rewards courage and derring-do, that incentivises having a go. A game that is about more than who can hold what they have for the longest.
The nuts and bolts of these new rules might be confusing for a few weeks but the most important detail is going to be how they leave people feeling. Everyone is stepping into the unknown and it’s going to be fascinating to see how it all shakes out.
When’s the last time you said that about the league?
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