Anthony Daly: A league medal is now as valuable as a loose €2 coin

The greatest irony of the competition is that it will still produce some brilliant contests in the opening weeks before managers and players decide to pull up the handbrake

Sat, 04 Feb, 2023 - 09:15

Anthony Daly

When Clare won the National hurling league in 1977, I was in third class in Clarecastle NS. Shortly afterwards in May of that year, there was a community week in the parish which involved a parade through Clarecastle involving local businesses, schools and community organisations.

I can’t remember the full context or theme behind our presentation, and whether it involved the GAA club or school, or both combined. In any case, four of us from the school were picked out to stand above on a float wearing Clare jerseys and show off the National league cup.

The trophy was easy to get our hands on because Johnny Callanan was on the Clare team. The jerseys though, must have been harder to source because it wasn’t like it is now where you could just walk into a sports shop, or go online, and buy small jerseys for four eight- and nine-year-olds. There was no Clare U-14 team at the time so the club must have borrowed four jerseys off Sixmilebridge.

I still struggle to piece all the grainy granules in my head together to remember the full picture but, whatever the theme was, I can still vividly recall the feeling of pride as we stood on the back of that truck. It has never left me.

Context frames everything. Clarecastle reached the county final the following year but it had been a barren time for the club. Clare hadn’t won a National League since 1946, or a Munster title since 1932, so getting the opportunity to celebrate that level of success as a child was bound to leave a massive impression on me.

Forty-five years on, the whole world has dramatically changed, especially the GAA. Our innocence and our deep thirst for any form of success as a county was bound to trigger an explosion of emotion around winning a league title.

Over four decades on though, and winning a league title is nearly a trigger for hiding the cup and making sure nobody gets carried away. In fact, you don’t even have to warn people off anymore - that was obvious amongst the Waterford supporters after last year’s league final win against Cork.

It’s a real pity that the league has become that devalued. The two medals I really regret not having are an All-Ireland club and a National League. That club medal would obviously mean a lot more but our second most important inter-county medal now seems to contain as much value as a loose €2 coin.

The reasons are obvious. Any former player or manager working in media now who speaks out against the split season is almost accused of having an agenda against the new format because it suits them financially for the season to be longer than it actually is.

I can guarantee you that when I talk about the split season that it certainly isn’t for those reasons. It suited me down to the ground last year for the inter-county season to be over in July so that I could go back and focus on Clarecastle, along with being free every Sunday afternoon to work in the bar during a busy period late in the summer.

There are loads of positives around the split season but, no matter what you say about the new system, you can’t say that it hasn’t completely devalued hurling’s second most important competition.

It’s a shame but it’s no surprise when the league final takes place two weeks out from the start of the round-robin provincial championships. The teams which reached the league final last year – Waterford and Cork – certainly can’t say it was a positive towards their performances in Munster. Neither could Wexford in Leinster, after being the only county to win all five of their regulation league games in Division 1. Then Limerick don’t bother with the competition and they go on to win another All-Ireland.

Managers and coaches have to be far more clinically minded now in such a condensed format because the games are coming harder and faster than ever before.

I will still argue that the split season hasn’t made a massive difference to club players, which I saw first-hand with Clarecastle last year. Mark Landers repeatedly says on the Irish Examiner podcast that lads can plan their holidays now but that has nearly been the case for a decade.

Clarecastle were still down three players because they were in the US for the summer. Lads will always travel abroad but one of my main arguments against the split season is that our second most important competition has effectively been sacrificed for it.

It’s gone to the stage that teams are nearly afraid to even be seen to be going for a league title because it carries such a health warning. Apart from Kilkenny, not many other teams are aiming to win it. That makes predicting the outcome of games almost impossible.

And yet, the greatest irony of the competition is that it will still produce some brilliant contests in the opening weeks before managers and players decide to pull up the handbrake.

I’m already salivating at the prospect of going to Cork on Saturday evening, wondering how I can get to the Páirc without getting annihilated in traffic. I cannot wait to head to the Gaelic Grounds for Clare-Limerick next Saturday where I expect there to be at least 20,000 in attendance. Is that a little far-fetched? I doubt it.

Despite the lack of interest teams have in winning the league, these players don’t know how to hold back. We saw that in some of the early rounds last year. I was in the Gaelic Grounds for the Galway-Limerick game the evening of the All-Ireland club finals in mid-February and the ferocity and intensity of some of the tackling that night was nearly frightening. I remember thinking to myself at one stage, ‘If you weren’t properly conditioned going into that maelstrom, you’d risk getting maimed’.

I streamed a load of the Munster League games in January and, while the competition was defined by experimentation, I was taken aback by the level of hitting and tackling. When Tipperary and Waterford met in the opening game on a cold midweek night in early January, lads were fighting for their lives to win the ball to try and make sure they were going to make the panel for the Allianz League.

And yet, once the weather turns better and the days get longer, it’s almost as if the hardness and darkness is also filtered out of some of the contests. That’s only natural when everyone – including the supporters – have one eye on the start of the round-robin championships.

I still think there is so much more that the GAA can do to treat the league with more respect. It could be structured far better to ensure greater competitiveness but the GAA clearly don’t want to reduce the number of games in the competition (why do we need semi-finals?) And once you go so close to the start of the round-robin, how can you guarantee that competitiveness that the latter stages of any prominent competition demands?

Unlike last year, I just hope the final includes a team from Leinster and Munster to safeguard against more shadow-boxing, especially if two teams from the same province were meeting again a couple of weeks later. Who’s going to win the league? I haven’t a clue. Who has? All I can say for now is that I think Kilkenny and Galway might want it most.