Concerned? JBM’s seen it all before

ALLIANZ HL DIVISION 1A

Logic says it won’t come to this, with the men in the red jerseys falling through the trapdoor at the Gaelic Grounds tomorrow. Logic says the team that in their opening game of the league put 26 points on Tipperary won’t mark their concluding game by being relegated. Plain old common sense, never mind logic, ordains that Cork ought not to lose to Clare yet again this spring.

But in the event they do, what of it? The sun will still rise on Monday morning and Jimmy Barry-Murphy will get on with his preparations for the Munster semi-final. And somehow one doesn’t envisage disappointed Leesiders spending the week running around insisting to all and sundry that, to paraphrase Christy Ring, the top flight of the league will be ‘only half-dressed without Cork’ next year.

In point of fact, early on in the course of JBM’s first coming as manager Cork were beaten by Michael O’Grady’s Dublin in Parnell Park, a defeat that ended their league aspirations for 1997. In the there and then it appeared to be the most depressing of omens. Needless to say it turned out to be nothing of the sort.

The following season Cork won the league. The season after that they won the All-Ireland. Springtime disappointment can damage your summertime health? Not in the least, albeit less so than of yore, given that Kilkenny and Tipperary have spent the past decade demonstrating that what happens in the league echoes in the championship.

Granted, defeat tomorrow will be inordinately tough on the losers. During the preliminary phase of the competition both Cork and Clare compiled a series of solid performances that under any other structure would have guaranteed them safety. If Davy Fitz has cause for regret tomorrow night it won’t be so much for whatever woes Cork wreaked on his troops as for the woes they wreaked on themselves with their wayward second-half shooting against Kilkenny last month.

That was the day Clare should not only have indemnified themselves against relegation but also secured their semi-final spot. The scarcity of contestants helped make it a Division 1A of desperately fine lines, and Davy Fitz — even if he knew the terms and conditions when he signed the document — will have every right to feel chagrined. For the Calais engraved on Mary Tudor’s heart, read the “Cusack Park, March 24, 2013” on Davy’s ticker.

While he’s at it he’ll have ample grounds for another complaint should he require one. Over the past few years the league has created the phenomenon of the yo-yo team — a side good enough for an eight-team top flight but not quite good enough for a six-team top flight and thus condemned to oscillate between the two indefinitely. A team like a Clare or a Dublin. Think Reading FC, except without the parachute payments from Sky.

Fine lines indeed. But where does one draw the red line? How broad should the league church be made? So broad as to include Wexford and Offaly in a 10-team Division 1 and thereby condemn them to cop the regular/occasional serious beating from Tipperary, Kilkenny or — on their good days — Galway? Scarcely.

Competitive sport by its nature entails disappointment, even if in the end you usually get what you deserve. A league is by its very definition a meritocracy. The strong will swim, the weak will sink and no amount of gerrymandering with the structure will alter this inconvenient truth.

Of course, it’s going to be hard luck on someone tomorrow. But it was hard luck on Limerick last weekend to lose by a point to Dublin, a team they’d seen off with something to spare a few weeks earlier, and miss out on promotion again. Again: terms and conditions, people (that said, a seven-team Division 1A would at least possess the benefit of saving an extra contestant from the guillotine).

We come back, inevitably, to the hurling landscape as it stands and has stood for a number of years now. One flight of stairs but too many teams existing, or subsisting, on too many different steps. The usual faces at or near the top. Clare and Limerick and Dublin a couple of steps below them. Wexford and Offaly a step below that again. Laois and Antrim next. Carlow a little below that. And so on. And the league format is expected to be able to take account of all this, to be all things to all counties? It can’t. End of.

Unfortunately that hasn’t stopped people tinkering. Next year another attempt will be made to square the impossible circle with — oh Lordy! — the reintroduction of quarter-finals. Quarter-finals again. Please, shoot me now. Even if your name is Emmanuel Adebayor.

It’s a ludicrous decision for two reasons. Firstly, because a competition purporting to be a league shouldn’t have quarter-finals; secondly, because league quarter-finals are the nearest thing hurling gets to Waiting For Godot. These are afternoons where nothing happens: twice.

The most sensible words in the debate were uttered during the week by Tommy Lanigan, the chairman of the HDC. We’re having the wrong conversation, or at any rate having the conversation about the wrong subject. This is the league, for heaven’s sake. Let’s not get worked up over the starter when it’s the main course we should be worrying about.

Offaly may well end up playing two championship matches this summer. Most of the teams hanging out on Offaly’s section of the stairs certainly will. Two championship matches when they should be guaranteed four or five, at least half of them on home turf. Was it for this, everything Ger Loughnane did and said? Specifically the bit about how teams will only improve by playing games in summer? Or to put it another way: come the end of July, Bruce Springsteen will have made more appearances in Nowlan Park than Henry Shefflin has.

It would be amusing if it weren’t serious. Which it is. But getting worked up about the league the way we do keeps causing us to miss the wood for the trees.

Cork tomorrow, by the way.