Off we go then, for another summer on the road to Croker. Of course, it’s not actually summer yet, but we’ll get to that.
For the hurlers competing in the Munster and Leinster championships, for the hurlers who are already underway after last weekend, and for the All-Ireland champion footballers of Tyrone et al, this is it – the dates that they had pencilled into the diary six months ago have finally swung around. If you’re not ready to go now, you’re just not ready.
Sky Sports has live coverage of Galway against Wexford in the Leinster hurling championship at 4.30pm on Saturday evening, which already looks like a huge game in how the Leinster group will turn out. It’s not knock-out, but it’ll feel like a massive game, because that’s what it will be.
Whatever about the respective abilities of either side, one feels reasonably sure that a team led by Henry Shefflin will have a keen appreciation of what being prepared for championship really means.
It took 12 years after 1997 for Galway to be introduced into the Leinster championship, but even at that they were not allowed the benefit of home games
And maybe it’s fitting that it’s the Galway hurlers who start this championship summer on Easter Saturday, because at a time when plenty of people are speculating about the seismic changes being foisted upon the GAA public, about how starting the whole jamboree at Easter will change forever our understanding of what the championship even is or means to people, no team has had to roll with the structural punches quite like the men from west of the Shannon.
Change is coming this year, for sure, but sometimes change is good. Change has inevitably improved the hurling championship from the straight knock-out event it was up until 1997, 25 years ago.
But even as those changes came into force, Galway were left behind. The backdoor came in for beaten Leinster and Munster finalists 25 years ago, but there was no backdoor for Galway.
Even when a second chance was offered to all teams in 2002, there were years where there was only a second chance given to Galway if they lost to Antrim.
It took 12 years after 1997 for Galway to be introduced into the Leinster championship, but even at that they were not allowed the benefit of home games.
It was only at the start of the 2018 season that Galway were completely equal partners in the All-Ireland senior hurling championship, a season they entered as All-Ireland champions.
So not everyone is happy with starting the championships in April. That is a perfectly fair position to hold, as it goes
They would have their two home games, and two away games in the provincial round-robin series, and start at the same place as every other team in the competition. It might have felt like 21 years from the first change in the system was a long time to wait to finally reach equity, but that’s how long it took for the Galway hurlers.
There’s a lesson here, surely. In the last straight knock-out hurling championship of 1996, everyone knew that Galway having to beat Roscommon and New York to get to an All-Ireland semi-final was ludicrous – a state of affairs that managed to be unfair to both Galway and to every other team in the competition. The correct answer didn’t come straight away, but we got there.
Complaining that “but this is how it’s always been” to a Galway hurler would get you a raised eyebrow or two.
So not everyone is happy with starting the championships in April. That is a perfectly fair position to hold, as it goes. You like something, you don’t want it to change, you convince yourself that correlation equals causation – ie, the time of year that this thing you like usually happens, is in and of itself the reason you like it in the first place.
Then again, club players in Dublin spent the last few pre-Covid Aprils playing the first two games in a three-game qualifying group in their championship, before being then made to wait until September or October to play the third and final game in that group. So let’s just say there have been inconsistencies throughout the system.
April has been a mess of a month for years. The national league is finished, the intercounty player goes back to his club for a few weeks, with his head naturally still at least half in intercounty business. And your average club player can’t help feeling like the annoying phone call the GAA decided to get out of the way at 8.30 in the morning, just so they could get on with the real business of their day.
True compromise is coming to a conclusion where no one is really happy, and maybe there will be a bit of pain coming back to the club player after a few years of this, but right now this solution seems like a long-overdue correction back in their direction.
And if our final goal is for the football championship to more closely resemble a hurling format that means every one of the top eight or nine teams starts their year at the same place on the start line, then the calendar and structure changes coming this year and next year might just be seen as important first steps.
