Seán Moran assesses the contenders for this year’s All-Ireland football title and says it’s stretching credibility, on the basis of all known evidence, that the champions could come from outside Kerry, Tyrone or improving Cork

BY RIGHTS this should be a transformative year in the GAA All-Ireland football championship. For the past seven seasons the Sam Maguire has gone to one of two counties, Kerry or Tyrone.

When Tyrone have had their run properly timed, they have won the All-Ireland. All other years Kerry have taken charge.

This year there are very good reasons to believe the sequence will be broken. Kerry have had a clear-out of the panel with four of last year’s All-Ireland-winning team no longer available because of retirement and the Australian Football League.

Tyrone have had their poorest league campaign, getting relegated, since Mickey Harte took over and are carrying injuries into the championship.

There is no doubt in the eyes of the bookmakers, 2010 will be a year of change.

Cork have been slowly building and refining a challenge in the recent years of the Kerry-Tyrone duopoly but it has come at the cost of much psychic wear-and-tear at the hands of their neighbours.

For the past five straight years, Cork have been eliminated from the All-Ireland series by Kerry, despite having bettered them in Munster in three of those years. Reshaping a side of young players with no wounding memories has become difficult, as year by year the new generation has been incrementally introduced to the Croke Park headlock.

Once again Conor Counihan’s team has done all that could be asked of it during the league, nailing down Division One within 12 months of winning Division Two and introducing some new talent to the panel.

Championships mightn’t be won in April but Cork’s problem is that they are only won in September and that is the only outcome to their season that will register as satisfactory.

That’s a tough demand for any team.

There is a consensus that the above-mentioned are the only three counties which can actually win the All-Ireland: Kerry and Tyrone because they know how and Cork because they have the talent and have done the right things so far.

They also have the historical precedent of 20 years ago when the county recorded its only back-to-back All-Ireland football sequence and most recent title win. In 1989 Cork had lost the previous two All-Ireland finals – to the same county, Meath, and the second in particularly demoralising circumstances with their opponents reduced to 14 men for virtually the entire match.

Meath’s three-in-a-row aspirations went up in smoke in the ’89 Leinster final and if Cork were open to the predictable slight that they never beat Meath (an omission they rectified in 1990) they beat Dublin and Mayo to win the All-Ireland.

The problem with that scenario this year is that whereas Tyrone in their off-years haven’t been fussy about who eliminates them from the championship, Kerry have to go back to 2002 to find the last time they were put out by anyone except Tyrone.

Cork need to be careful what they wish for in those terms as, should Tyrone remove Kerry from the All-Ireland, the Ulster county wouldn’t lack motivation squaring up to the team that visited a painful defeat on them only last August.

So how accurate is the belief that Kerry and Tyrone are in sufficient decline to leave the door more widely open to Cork?

Kerry’s loss of players isn’t as bad as it appeared some months ago. Since then Michael McCarthy has reconsidered his decision to retire for a second time and Brendan Kealy has put in a credible shift in goals during the NFL during auditions for Diarmuid Murphy’s position.

Despite the departures the champions can still field an attack featuring three footballers of the year, Kieran Donaghy, Colm Cooper and Paul Galvin, and someone who’s been a nominee and three-time All Star, Declan O’Sullivan.

Tyrone’s situation is more serious. Inability to beat Dublin in a must-win league fixture is uncharacteristic and injuries are piling up at the start of the championship.

In the county’s favour is their collective knowledge of how to win.

Two years ago after losing to Down in Ulster you could have named your price for Tyrone to win the All-Ireland but Harte’s powers of improvisation and the adaptability of the players makes them capable of catching a wave. Unlike the chasing pack, including Cork, they know how to pick up All-Irelands.

It’s stretching credibility on the basis of all known evidence that the eventual champions could come from outside of the big three.

Galway and Mayo are coached by All-Ireland-winning managers but have been laid bare at the top level too often to envisage a renewed challenge without a major influx of new personnel.

Dublin have sourced the fresh faces but it is unrealistic to expect them to do anything much more than retain Leinster for a record equalling sixth successive title – the difference being that Wexford, Kildare and Dublin’s 1970s predecessors managed to harvest four, two and three All-Irelands respectively from their extended provincial sequence whereas the current Dubs haven’t even reached a final.

Armagh were impressive in the NFL Division Two final and Down throughout that campaign so both will harbour ambitions in Ulster but it’s a bit soon for the latter and the former are so used to winning the province – their dual stranglehold with Tyrone stretches back to 1999 – that it has become like an albatross.

In fact Ulster champions have been as unsuccessful as Connacht’s in the All-Ireland quarter-finals, losing five out of nine.

For Armagh though, a provincial title would still be a welcome start to Paddy O’Rourke’s tenure with a developing team.

On a general note, this is a World Cup summer and GAA attendances can be vulnerable but not seriously so unless Ireland are in the finals.

But the GAA will nonetheless throw an anxious eye over the returns in June.