John Fogarty: A humbling hour for hurling
GAA officials believe extending the inter-county season by one week rather than two would be more palatable to stakeholders but how to use the extra week is the question. Pic: ©INPHO/Tom O'Hanlon
And all the chickens come home to roost.
Hurling is in the ha’penny place. It might be blessed with a most beguiling rivalry but All-Ireland quarter-final weekend was a chastening couple of days.
For all the right decisions the GAA made – splitting the games, giving one of them a Sunday billing – they couldn’t guarantee good fare. And yet they could have prevented the televised Dublin-Donegal football and Cork-Offaly hurling games overlapping. That was more than unfortunate.
That the first 10 minutes of Cork v Offaly wasn’t shown on RTÉ was typical as the hurling games were already being played in the shade of Gaelic football’s All-Ireland SFC round three. The football fixtures were All-Ireland preliminary quarter-finals in everything but name.
Last September, we wrote that the Hurling Development Committee (HDC) were too slow to disband the game’s own All-Ireland preliminary quarter-finals. “Getting rid of two largely meaningless games is the easy part but the HDC don’t appear to realise there is more to it than that,” read this column. “There will be just five senior inter-county fixtures after that provincial final weekend. Football, on the other hand, will have 55 between the Sam Maguire and Tailteann Cups.”
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Had they put the proposal on the clár of Special Congress last October instead of Congress this year, it would have empowered the Central Competitions Control Committee to reschedule the Joe McDonagh Cup to run concurrently with the Liam MacCarthy Cup like the Tailteann Cup does the Sam Maguire Cup.
A McDonagh Cup final played before one of the All-Ireland semi-finals, even the semi-finals on the same card as the MacCarthy Cup quarter-finals, would have done wonders for the promotion of the game.
The knock-on effect of the HDC’s inertia is felt now just as there are a measly four Liam MacCarthy Cup games in June and another four in July. It goes from feast to famine, from running to standing still. It’s told to hurry up and wait.
Interviewed by South East Radio’s Liam Spratt on Saturday, GAA president-elect Derek Kent spoke of the squeeze that is being put on hurling. “It’s All-Ireland quarter-final weekend and it’s all about football.”
Kent has long maintained the frame of the inter-county window needs to be widened and his tune hasn’t changed. “We need to look at the scheduling of our games and how do we elongate our season without overriding the club season.”
Facing a certain death, a motion to expand the inter-county season by two weeks from 2027 was withdrawn last February. If two was pushing it, one could be the compromise whereby the last of the two All-Ireland senior finals would be played on the August Bank Holiday weekend.
Officials believe it is a more palatable solution but how to use the extra week is the question. Two weeks between the All-Ireland finals sure gives each of the games promotional autonomy but would the week be better used starting the hurling championship a week later?
The regular refrain from managers of teams going out early is they are exiting the championship just as the weather is improving. More teams should be playing up to the June Bank Holiday but another week alone won’t be enough.
It’s Kent’s assertion that the real answer is structural. Galway are of the same opinion and they have refined their 2024 proposal whereby there would be considerably more weekends exclusive to each code.
We know all of hurling’s appeal is in the front and football is in the back of the season. If football is an estate, hurling is a coupe. Football sprawls. The Liam MacCarthy Cup has just three weekends to itself – the provincial finals, All-Ireland semi-finals and final. The Sam Maguire Cup/provincials have six.
Something will have to give and might it be Munster GAA parting with their €8.3 million golden goose in gate receipts? From their cold, dead hands, you would argue, but they mightn’t have to in order to allow one more team into the All-Ireland series whereby four All-Ireland quarter-finals would be facilitated.
For three seasons between 2005 and ’07, there was the full complement of quarter-finals and they were attractive. All but two of the 12 games in those years were played in Croke Park. The average attendance for those double-headers was 49,172.
If they were to return, the provincial winners and runners-up would have to be awarded home advantage against the third and fourth-placed teams in the opposite province. The provinces would insist on that and rightly so.
Where Munster could be compensated for giving up some of their bounty is a share of, if not all the gate receipts for their finalists’ quarter-finals and Leinster likewise.
It seems a reasonable trade-off for a larger hurling footprint in the summer months. It would mean eating into some of the €13.2m the GAA garnered from the All-Ireland SHC in 2025 but a small sacrifice for the promotion of the game, right? Right?
Late last week, an IRFU study carried out with UL found that a 38% and 63% decreases in tackle-event concussion rates in men’s and women’s community (amateur) rugby since the organisation’s introduction of the lower rugby tackle.
The fears that spook parents have yet to be assuaged – concussion rates at schoolboy rugby largely remain the same even though overall injury rates are down 19% – but the adult figures are promising.
Anecdotally, the migration from rugby to other sports for safety reasons has benefitted the likes of Gaelic football and rugby, but the sight of a motionless David Reidy on the field on Saturday evening after a bad tackle will serve as a warning that hurling can do better. It must do better.
Referee James Owens took the right decision in sending Brendan Kenny to the line and the word is the Dublin hurler was distraught about the extent of the injury he caused to the Clareman.
It was an expensive lesson for him but not so much as it was for Reidy who is thankfully recovering well and to the GAA who have to do more to protect the player in possession when he is not in a position to protect himself.
Reidy’s is not a hard case. Brian Lohan spoke of a number of concussion issues in his group, Shane O’Donnell being the obvious example. Referees have their part to play, as Lohan says, but then so do the players and showing themselves more respect and wearing approved helmets.
Even if such headgear isn’t proven to prevent or reduce the effect of concussion (O’Donnell is a member of a minority that wears an approved helmet), players’ own attitude to safety has to improve greatly.
The hurling review group can also play their part by refining the tackle and when and how it can be made.
Former GAA president Nickey Brennan could be forgiven for sighing as he watched on this past weekend’s All-Ireland quarter-finals.
Recently charged with reviewing the Leinster senior hurling championship, his task seems to have been made taller by Dublin’s 13-point and Offaly's 26-point losing margins to Clare and Cork respectively.
They were gaps in keeping with what we have experienced in the erstwhile All-Ireland preliminary quarter-finals – for the record, the difference in last year’s games were 21 and 23 points.
“The group has been tasked with undertaking a comprehensive review of the current championship landscape, including any impact changes may have on the Joe McDonagh Cup and the All-Ireland series,” read the press release from the Leinster Council last Monday week.
But for Laois beating Dublin in 2019, the Leinster SHC may have remained at five teams and it does seem on the plump side with six. It has to become a meaner competition and not so facilitating.
The idea of splitting the province into two groups of four would only be a sop and doing nothing to narrow the gulf with the Munster championship. Leinster is already a gateway from the McDonagh Cup. It can’t afford to be any further accommodating.
It houses the majority of hurling’s squeezed middle. They are jammed enough as it is.
