John Fogarty: Knockout football has had its day. The novelty will soon wear off

Romantic notions about another knockout championship shouldn't conceal the problems

Conor Sweeney of Tipperary is tackled by Sean Meehan, left, and Maurice Shanley of Cork during the Munster GAA Football Senior Championship Final match between Cork and Tipperary at Páirc Uí Chaoimh in Cork. Photo by Eóin Noonan/Sportsfile

The days grow longer and the GAA’s Championship options are getting shorter. And so too the odds of a second successive straight knockout All-Ireland senior football championship.

And with that all the absurdities, inconsistencies and inequalities of the provincial model will once more be laid bare.

Should Kerry be drawn on the same side as Cork again (this time Cork have the semi-final bye), they will at least have a quarter-final game under their belts and the motivation of November’s shuddering defeat to stir them, but the possibility of another early exit can’t be dismissed. 

If one of the few teams whose collective breath at least warmed the necks of Dublin goes out as quickly this time around it’ll be their own fault, but the groan as another Sam Maguire Cup becomes less competitive will be audible.

Another straight knockout and right away almost all of Ulster would have to be excluded from the list of genuine All-Ireland contenders. Cavan and Monaghan will be spared a preliminary round draw having started there last year, as will Derry and Tyrone who were there the year before, but were Donegal to begin at that stage the prospect of winning six straight games looks nigh on impossible.

The prospect of one of Galway and Mayo going out before the Connacht final is not far away either — restrictions pending, Mayo are due to travel to London this year and the last time they did that in 2016 they faced the Tribesmen in the next round. Pádraic Joyce will be doing everything not to fall at the first hurdle for the second year in a row but them’s the breaks if it’s all or nothing again.

Listening to some, they'd swear the knockout championship returned last year like a jilted girlfriend or boyfriend to remind them of how wrong they were to end the relationship. They shouldn’t be anything more than flattered by the attention but they are tempted to rekindle the old flame.

“Would the All-Ireland be diminished if it was run off as it was this winter: in a compact time period with a series of riveting games?” asked Kevin McStay. “Maybe the league should be recalibrated into a competition where we get to see teams on a consistent basis. And the All-Ireland, then, as a traditional Old Bible knockout contest, like the old FA Cup: everything on the day. The truth is: if a team is good enough, then they will eventually win. They may get caught out in a knockout season — as Donegal were. But ultimately, if they have All-Ireland winning qualities, those will come to the fore.”

In an open championship, McStay’s point would be stronger but The Krypton Factor that is the Ulster SFC hurts his argument. Former GAA president Seán Kelly is also of the same mind as McStay: “The knockout drama is in some respects irreplaceable so we've got to really think about that and see what is the best thing to do because if you can get a repeat of that excitement last year, we didn't have that in the last 10 years, really.”

Just how much of the excitement was novelty, though? And in the grander scheme of things, didn’t Cavan and Tipperary’s accomplishments prove to be off-Broadway hits that flopped when promoted to the Theatre District? As Dublin secretary John Costello suggested in his annual report, there is no guarantee they wouldn’t both have won on that same November afternoon had there been a qualifier system in place.

If the GAA does go ahead with geographically-split Allianz Football Leagues, likely involving three or four games, and a knockout All-Ireland SFC while providing a qualifier system in the Liam MacCarthy Cup, the GAA will make the same point as last year — “we are giving each football team a guarantee of x number of games”. 

However, it’s more Championship games players want. The pandemic has been a reckoning for the GAA fixtures schedule, providing the split season and a tighter inter-county season, but a knockout Championship does not fit in with the mantra of squaring the training to game ratio.

For the second time in eight months, footballers might be casting an envious eye at their hurling counterparts, who because of their tiered structure will have more Championship outings, who are shown that little bit of clemency to get it right the second time around. That green-eyed monster is already there because of the provincial round-robin nature of the Liam MacCarthy Cup.

Just like the sepia-tinted, patina-freckled nostalgic pieces we filled your pages, tablet and phone screens with this time last year, knockout football has had its day. It was any port in a storm last year and may be again this year but it is a concept born purely of context and the need to compromise.

Call the Munster SFC Cup after Ó Sé

“Historically, we in the GAA have never spent too much time or put a lot of thought into how we can honour these people and commemorate them in the form of trophies.”

The words of former Dublin senior hurling manager Humphrey Kelleher in this newspaper eight years ago when he released his excellent book, 'GAA Family Silver', which told the stories behind the names of 101 cups and trophies.
Well, after the Munster Council last week chose to defer a decision on naming the cup for their provincial senior football championship, it can’t be said that there isn’t enough consideration being given to it. 

Although there was support for the SHC cup being called after Mick Mackey, the jury is still out on whether to name the SFC reward after Bloody Sunday victim Mick Hogan or Páidí Ó Sé, who won no fewer than 11 Munster senior medals as a player and seven managing Kerry.

Kerry manager Páidí O'Sé celebrates following the 1997 All-Ireland Senior Championship Final at Croke Park, Dublin. Photo by David Maher/Sportsfile

The GAA’s recent record of naming cups is a chequered one — look at the Tommy Murphy Cup and the yet-to-be-played Tailteann Cup, for example. And who knows what the provincial competitions will look like next year but the Ó Sé Cup has a ring to it.

Accentuating positives of a gap year

The musings of Diarmuid Connolly and Seán Quigley in recent days will surely give other inter-county players ideas about jumping out of the goldfish bowl.

Not that there is much of a bowl to leap from at the moment but the perspective the pair got from taking a break was beneficial to them. 

Hailing his decision to step away from Dublin in 2018 as “one of the best things I ever did”, former star Diarmuid Connolly said: “Taking the year out gave me a bit of a broader scope on the world and it wasn't all just about GAA football. I had to start working on other aspects of my life."

Quigley, 29, who will return to Fermanagh colours this season after claiming to suffer from burnout, told The Belfast Telegraph: “The whole appetite, the arse just fell out of it for me, I could not have been bothered. I know people talk about mental fatigue and so on. I just could not be bothered. I didn’t want to do it and it came to a head. I just thought, ‘what is the point?’ And that was really it.”

The likes of Colin Fennelly in Kilkenny and Seadna Morey in Clare will hope to find their appetites replenished by similar decisions for 2021. Unlike the bevy of players who skipped the 2020 season to travel, there is no real option for them to do likewise, but sometimes a rest is as good as a change.

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