Kieran Shannon: For one year only there is beauty in this Championship cruelty

The other big loser this past weekend is a crowd no one has really talked about or at least identified in such terms: the Clare footballers. Jamie Malone, above, reacts after their Munster SFC quarter-final loss to Tipperary. Photo by Diarmuid Greene/Sportsfile

Sometimes in the carnage that comes with a rapid-fire do-or-die championship like this, we can lose count or sight of some of the bodies.

Such was the volume of games Des Cahill and The Sunday Game team had to go through the other night, there was no time for a soundbite from Banty relaying his wild disappointment that his biyz’ championship was over after just 70 – well, 95 – minutes. If coming through the backdoor to lose to Kerry in 2007 felt like having his heart removed without surgery, then this one must have been akin to being knifed in a streetside mugging. Even if it was one he and his team walked not so much straight in to as backwards and sideways like they did with the ball when they were seven up.

And so, while we thankfully will have another chance this coming weekend to see more of Tony Kelly in one of his prime years, that’s it for Conor McManus for 2020.

There is a certain beauty in this winter’s brutality: hand on heart, would the shout you let out when Raymond Galligan’s long-range missile sailed between those posts have been quite as loud had Monaghan the safety net of the backdoor?

It’d be mistaken though to be laid astray by calls that now all championship should be knockout, either from those too young to never have known how unfair it used to be or those too nostalgic to properly remember; Steven McDonnell, the Armagh footballer, for one, seems to have forgotten that while he played into August the one year he played under the old format, Monaghan that same 2000 season had five-year veterans who didn’t know what it was like to play a second game in a summer.

Last Saturday’s defeat means Monaghan likewise have now gone five years without reaching an Ulster final. But thankfully in the interim we’ve seen McManus score a goal against Kerry in Clones, play in All Ireland quarter-finals and semi-finals in Croker. He’s been far more than just “one of the men of 2013 and 2015”. Thanks to the system as much as his own talent, he’s continued to be a perennial star when not an All Star.

Last year’s championship threw up more than its share of shocks in the provinces that 2020 would be doing well to match: Roscommon ambushing both Mayo and Galway, to go with Cavan tripping up Monaghan then as well. But there’s no escaping from it: novelty triggers excitement. Just as it was wild fun in 2001 when Westmeath were shocking the likes of Mayo with the advent of the backdoor, it's the same now in 2020 with Donegal disposing of Tyrone because there is no backdoor.

The other big loser this past weekend is a crowd no one has really talked about or at least identified in such terms: the Clare footballers.

Over the last seven years under Colm Collins they’d quietly and manfully established themselves as a respected, hard-to-beat, consistent outfit. Every year bar 2015 they’d made incremental progress. Getting the county out of the basement division for the first time in over a decade. Winning a Division Three title and reaching the All Ireland quarter-finals. Retaining their Division Two status for four years straight. All the time it had the feel that they were just one or two big wins away from approximating the team of the 1990s, and that if they weren’t to do enough to trigger the cows going unmilked within the county for a night, that this generation of Clare player would at least get to produce and experience their own Martin Daly goal moment.

Even just 10 days ago it seemed as if glory was finally opening up for them, that fortune was eventually going to rhyme with perseverance. With 10 minutes go in their final league game against Armagh, they were staring at Division One football and a ticket to play the Dubs which would attract the kind of crowds this team’s efforts had long earned. With the way results were falling elsewhere, whoever won those final 10 minutes in Cusack Park would win promotion. The sides were level, Clare were at home with all the momentum: if ever they were to do it, this was it.

The moment passed. Instead Armagh reeled off the last five points. But the disappointment couldn’t linger for Clare. Outside the team camp, Clare people were just relieved the county hadn’t been relegated while within the setup their focus would have already turned to the following week’s championship game against Tipperary. After four consecutive years of having to play Kerry in early June, they had a golden opportunity to finally reach a Munster final under Collins.

Now, after one of their flattest performances ever under Collins, they’ve let that chance slip too. And with it, you’d fear, this team’s window has closed as well. A run in the backdoor and they’d have been able to cushion or atone that loss and create some momentum and optimism to sustain them over the winter. That will be much harder to garner now.

Such is Collins’ standing within the county, Clare football people would be loathe for him to step away completely, and that with his unrivalled knowledge of the scene, the position of performance director of Clare football should be created for him. But as for remaining as manager of the senior team itself, Collins himself could well decline and feel it’s time for someone else.

For most people though there was only ever one game in Munster this year that was going to count. Indeed it’s not an exaggeration in proclaiming that this weekend’s clash of Cork and Kerry is the biggest game the Munster football championship has known in 20 years.

Cork may not be reigning Munster champions or have participated in a recent All Ireland final as Larry Tompkins’ team could claim when they entered a Munster semi-final against Kerry back in 2000. But not since then have the stakes being so high so early – even if it’s November now – in a championship year for a game between Cork and Kerry.

That match in Killarney ended up being one of the maddest and defining games in the rivalry between the counties. An enraged Tompkins on the line, fuming over Dara Ó Cinnéide being awarded a second penalty in the space of five minutes; a Colin Corkery-inspired comeback from Cork, only for a bit of magic from Maurice Fitzgerald, just back from a second leg break, to see Kerry over the line in the end. Kerry went on to play a further five games that summer and win the All Ireland.

And yet it could have been over for them after just 70 minutes. No career year from Mike Frank. No Footballer of the Year for Seamus Moynihan. No second All Ireland for Páidí which cemented his legacy as a coach.

Kerry this year look ready to win an All Ireland. Peter Keane in year two now knows his players. Dessie Farrell in year one does not quite yet know his; without Jim on the line and Jack McCaffrey haring down that line and the likes of Connolly, Brogan, O’Gara and Daly on the bench, they don’t quite have the same aura. While Mayo have rarely looked to have a deeper championship panel, they’ve rarely had a more unsettled starting 15.

But while you know Dublin will come out of Leinster, you can’t say Kerry will get out of Munster. That they’ll get out of Cork this weekend. The last time the counties played there they barely scraped past by three points. Kerry have improved and grown since then but so have Cork.

This Sunday there will be no 40,000 in the Park or flares in Seán O’Shea’s eyeline as he kicks into the Blackrock End the way there used to be for Mikey Sheehy or Maurice Fitzgerald or Dara Ó Cinnéide before him for any do-or-die game between these old rivals. But no game outside Croke Park this winter screams championship more. A local derby. A potential shock.

For one year only, the past is perfect. The beauty is in the cruelty. Win or go home.