How much more pain can Waterford hurling take?
Once hurling’s round robin system started in 2018, nine counties have been ever present in Munster and Leinster. Of those only Waterford have failed to qualify at least once for the knockout stages of the championship. Everybody else has come out at least three times.
In three of those years, they started with a big win at home in the opening round and failed to build on it. Even one of their first-round defeats was a heartening effort against Limerick, when Thurles was Waterford’s temporary home, and the All-Ireland champions at the time were at their wit’s end to beat Waterford by a couple of points.
But you wonder how much more of this they can take? How often can they make themselves believe that they’re not too far away? Peter Queally said after the Cork defeat that they had played “very well” in three of their games, but that assertion doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.
They were very good against Clare and not good against Tipperary. The murderous six-day turnaround was clearly a factor in their defeat to Limerick, but given the gap in class between the teams that evening it is hard to imagine how the outcome would have been different with another week’s rest.
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Given what had happened to Cork in the Gaelic Grounds, the league champions were widely perceived to be vulnerable in Páirc Uí Chaoimh on Sunday, and yet Waterford only made them sweat for about 10 minutes in the first half and another 10 minutes at the beginning of the final quarter.
Cork’s dysfunctional shooting was the principal reason why only six points separated the sides: Cork had 17 wides, another three shots dropped short, and there were some misses that Pat Ryan described as “brutal.” For Waterford that is the unpalatable reality.
The worry is that their greatest players of the modern era are all nearing the end: Tadhg de Búrca, Jamie Barron, Stephen Barrett and Austin Gleeson have all been playing for more than a decade. Two of them have been haunted by injury. Gleeson took a year out and this season, for various reasons, he couldn’t force his way back into the team.
Waterford’s consistent underachievement at age grade levels over the last 10 years means that there is not a ready supply of new talent coming through. The hurling championship cannot afford any team to fall off a cliff. How Waterford arrest this slide is everyone’s concern. – Denis Walsh
Teams go goal-crazy in All-Ireland series
Maybe life without the four-point goal ain’t so bad after all. The explosion in green flags since the end of the provincial championships in football has been remarkable. The first round of Sam Maguire matches ended on Sunday having seen 24 goals scored across the eight games. The equivalent figure after round one in 2024 was just 11.
Now, as the great Eamon O’Shea once replied when asked would his Tipperary team be able to handle Clare in a league semi-final, you should be careful making forecasts with very little data. This is one round of games, nothing more. In fact, it was a round of games where an avalanche of goals was badly needed in order just to catch up with the overall total from last year’s championship.
There were actually significantly fewer goals in the provincial championships this year than last year – 57 compared to 69. The Tailteann Cup totals have stayed broadly the same – 35 after two rounds this year, 37 after two rounds last year. And overall, it’s a statistical wash, more or less – 116 goals in the 2025 championship as against 117 at the equivalent stage of 2024.
The pointy heads at the Games Intelligence Unit have told us that while goalscoring has stayed more or less the same under the new FRC rules, goalscoring chances are slightly up. Maybe all that happened over the weekend is that the finishing got better – although it feels likely that the greasy conditions had a part to play as well.
But even just the eye test tells you that some teams had gone after weaknesses in the opposition and chased goals. Two of Louth’s four against Monaghan came from gorgeous kick passes to one-on-one matchups in the box. Tyrone’s Seánie O’Donnell drove at the heart of the Donegal defence in a way other sides have been reluctant to. Jordan Morris’s speed and menace and finish for Meath against Cork was elite stuff.
Goals are coming. Hallelujah. – Malachy Clerkin
Galway will play Kilkenny in far better shape
There has been a good bit of comment on Micheál Donoghue’s eventful weekend, returning to Parnell Park to see out the Leinster championship group with the same fixture as he had 12 months previously.
This time, of course, he was back with own county having conducted a Coriolanus raid on Salthill this time last year, which hastened the end of Henry Shefflin’s management out west. As Dublin manager that day, Donoghue was accused of agitating for David Burke’s first-half sending off.
Burke was Donoghue’s captain in Galway’s All-Ireland winning team of 2017. For all the speculation on a ruptured relationship, the manager on his return last year made sure to invite Burke to stay involved and he was excellent on Sunday.
It was a mirror image in many ways of last year’s denouement. In both years, Donoghue’s team scored 29 times, winning 12 months ago by six and this time by five, albeit the margin slightly defamed Galway at the weekend.
In both years, Donoghue’s team played against a formidable wind in the first half and laid the foundations for victory by managing it well, trailing by 0-2 at half-time in Salthill and level last Sunday.
The same referee Cork’s Colm Lyons, at the centre of the 16th-minute decision to red-card Burke, once again had to weigh up the decision whether to send off a Galway player after Daithi Burke’s shuddering frontal challenge on Conor Burke in the 26th minute, but this time issued yellow.
That was hardly the difference between losing and winning but Burke was excellent in shutting down the option of old school aerial barrage that Dublin had been harnessing effectively this championship.
Galway will play Kilkenny in Sunday week’s final in far better shape than they looked, in the subdued defeat by the champions on opening day back in April.
Donoghue has overseen a 30 per cent turnover in Galway’s match panel between the two seasons and having concluded the group campaign on a consistently improving trajectory, now has the chance to add to the two Leinster titles he oversaw in 2017 and 2018. – Seán Moran
Leinster hurling championship set up to be yo-yo model
Kildare’s run in this year’s Joe McDonagh Cup has brought some much-needed freshness to hurling’s middle earth. The promotion-relegation zone between the Liam MacCarthy and Joe McDonagh competitions has become a yo-yo system involving a handful of teams. Since the inception of the McDonagh Cup in 2018, only six counties have contested finals (Carlow, Westmeath, Antrim, Offaly, Kerry, Laois). Kildare will become the seventh.
Increasing the number of teams in the Leinster SHC has helped but there has still tended to be a pattern of the promoted Joe McDonagh team suffering relegation within a season or two of competing in Leinster.
At this time of the year, the question tends to emerge as to why the bottom team in the Munster SHC doesn’t find themselves facing the same level of jeopardy as their Leinster counterparts. Should the bottom team in Munster face the bottom team in Leinster in a relegation playoff? With respect to this year’s Joe McDonagh Cup finalists, Laois and Kildare, would they have a better chance of being competitive in the Leinster or Munster SHC next year? Admittedly, squaring the promotion-relegation circle is a difficult conundrum for the GAA.
But within the current format it is hard to see anything other than a continuation of the yo-yo model where the same glut of teams constantly move up and down the ladder. Is that progress? – Gordon Manning
Provincial winners need to get over their hangovers quickly
In the microcosm of a season that is the All-Ireland football series, every team has its own manifestations of hunger and of a hangover. There was ample evidence of both as Louth faced Monaghan in Newbridge on Saturday evening, as seen in some other venues too.
Louth were out just 13 days after winning their first Leinster football title in 68 years, also completing a revenge act on Meath after what happened in the 2010 final. A day like that demanded some raising of glasses long into the night, and perhaps the following day or two. It was the fourth longest famine in between winning provincial football titles in GAA history.
Monaghan were out five weeks after their late surge against Donegal in the Ulster quarter-final saw them beaten by just two points, 0-23 to 0-21.
It didn’t take long for the hunger and the hangover to manifest themselves. Monaghan held up possession from the throw-in and slowly moved the ball around, before closing in for some blood, Stephen O’Hanlon racing at the goal and firing low past Niall McDonnell, who did well to get a half-block on the shot.
Not long after, Sam Mulroy lined up his first free for Louth, well within his range, only it came off the upright. Mulroy did complete a superb pass from Tommy Durnin moments later to rattle the Monaghan net, but Louth were always chasing the game, never getting in front and in the end suffering the politely termed six-point hammering.
Louth had only four different scores compared to Monaghan’s eight, and went without a score for 15 minutes during the first half, and the opening 13 minutes of the second. They scored 1-1 at the death, but by then Monaghan’s absolute dominance was complete. Hangover versus hunger.
Ger Brennan didn’t deny that hangover afterwards, the Louth manager saying his team “were probably at four out of 10 today overall, and that is just down to maybe the effects of winning the Leinster final”.
With a short trip to face the in-form Down in Newry next Saturday evening, Louth will be hoping any lingering hangover will be turned into hunger. Three of the four provincial football champions this year suffered such fate, Connacht champions Galway losing to Dublin in their opening game last weekend, Ulster champions Donegal also beaten by Tyrone on Saturday evening.
The All-Ireland series format is changing again for 2026, the 16 Sam Maguire teams competing in a single-elimination round, with the winners advancing to Round 2A and the losers to Round 2B.
The winners of Round 2B will face the Round 2A losers in a preliminary quarter-final, before the four Round 2A winners and the winners of Round 2B advance to the quarter-finals (and subsequent knockout stages).
Which would appear to leave even less room for any provincial winning hangover, should that be the case. – Ian O’Riordan
