Michael Moynihan: Can we just find some love for the league?
Young Mayo fans ahead of the game against Kildare on Sunday afternoon.
Farewell to the league, then. It was nice knowing you.
Sorry for striking the apocalyptic note, but itâs catching. In the last few weeks the growing dissatisfaction with the hurling league has been getting louder and louder.
Every day thereâs a different complaint. Why isnât it more competitive? Why didnât we have a super Sunday a couple of weekends ago? Why arenât Limerick taking it seriously? Why isnât it more like the . . . football league, when all is said and done?
One question at a time, then.
For this observer the main issue with this yearâs league is that itâs this yearâs league. As in the first such campaign with no great gap between the end of the NHL and the beginning of the provincial championships. Consequently teams are finding their way when it comes to preparation: itâs also worth remembering that the round-robin provincial format is still a new challenge in and of itself, having barely been introduced before we were all struck with covid two years ago.
What does all of that mean? Teams trying to hit some kind of peak for late April are clearly sacrificing some league weeks for preparation: thatâs impossible to argue with.
Add in the decades of âleague is league but championship is championshipâ, a belief difficult to rinse out of the bloodstream, and one acknowledged by managers in post-game interviews as they constantly offer updates on how close their championship games are.
Perhaps in the next season or two, when managers and S and C coaches become more familiar with the demands of the calendar, youâll see more competitive games in the hurling league.
If you want to see competitive games in the first place, that is.
One of the sticks used to beat the hurling league with is the football league - as in, thereâs a spread of equally matched teams in four divisions, which results in a series of meaningful games which have augured into the makings of an NFL Red Zone with promotion and relegation in the balance to the final whistle in the last round of games this past weekend.
This is true, though the comparison omits one pesky fact. It isnât a comparison.
Gaelic football is not hurling. One sport is played at a competitive level in every county in Ireland bar one, perhaps, and the other isnât (and by the way, this is a well-known fact, so donât feel so proud of broadcasting it as though itâs the Third Secret of Fatima).
It surely follows that the more popular sport will be more competitive across a wider range of divisions, because it enjoys a greater spread of teams who will be able to match up with their counterparts and equivalents.
Be careful with those comparisons, though. The football league is more competitive than the hurling league, but is it as competitive as other leagues in other sports?
(In the last ten years there have been four different winners of the NFL; in the same time the NHL has been won by five counties.) If you dismiss that as a barometer of competitiveness, there are others. Take a national league in which the eventual All-Ireland champions were beaten by six goals in last yearâs league before reversing that decision in the All-Ireland semi-final.
Well, we all know that in hurling a team can get away from its opponents pretty fast if it gets a couple of goals - sorry, wait. Am being told that that happened in the football league last year.
That canât be true, because if it had occurred Iâd surely have heard the weeping and lamentation as the National Football League was declared unfit for purpose. Must have missed it.
A reader writes: given whatâs coming up in a few weeks, where is the hurley emoji? Why donât we have one?
(Clearly they hadnât seen the first part of this weekâs column.) My research tells me that all you need to get an emoji created is a ten-page paper that you submit to the Unicode Consortium, a non-profit organisation that sets the standard for how text is represented and displayed across various programmes and software. Apparently it deals with about 50 emoji proposals a year but most donât get very far because the icon must still look like the object it represents even at a very small size, which is where most proposals fail. However, I confidently predict a hurley and sliotar emoji combination will be produced as soon as anyone in the GAA gets around to it. Because if thereâs one thing a GAA official relishes, itâs a ten-page proposal that needs to be vetted by some kind of committee.
When it comes to following the lead of someone in sport, youâd think most people and organisations would shy away from John Terry.
Recently seen eulogising Roman Abramovich, the former Chelsea player has also been involved with NFTs, launching his own line of same - which promptly lost 90 per cent of their projected value.
I was going to try a basic Terry descriptor based on his back catalogue, which ranges from, ah, involvement with a teammateâs wife to various allegations of racism, assault and so on. I was soon overwhelmed with options, given parking in a disabled spot is a second-tier entry on the list.
What, then, possessed Liverpool FC to get involved in the world of NFTs? The charge sheet against non-fungible tokens is as long as . . . well, the charge sheet against Mr Terry.
Consider this throwaway paragraph from The Athletic: â. . . NFT trading has also been strongly associated with fraud and the blockchain technology underpinning those deals can be environmentally destructive. Carrying out the transactions requires vast amounts of computing power, and therefore electricity, though the extent of this varies according to the blockchain.â Youâd think that would give pause to any organisation. Until you also read The Athletic adding that in Liverpoolâs case, âif all the NFTs are purchased the club will stand to bring in nearly ÂŁ10 million, with 10 per cent of that being donated to the LFC Foundation.â Suddenly all becomes clear.
A professional sports club standing to make that kind of money from a couple of hoursâ work by a couple of its in-house graphic designers? The next question is obvious: how long before every sporting organisation in Ireland is doing this?
The next time someone talks to you about the good old days in Ireland, you can recommend Fintan OâTooleâs We Donât Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Ireland Since 1958 to them.
Itâs a cliche to say you donât appreciate the strangeness of the times when youâre living through them, but OâTooleâs book brings to vivid life the bizarre Ireland of the sixties and seventies in particular.
In fairness, bizarre isnât the right word, because it doesnât do justice to the grinding poverty, the widespread corruption, the hypocrisy of the powerful and the smothering grip of the church. The book depicts something that was less of a nation than a nation-sized casino, with the fix in on every table. The good old days is right.
