Ulster all thrills and spills right up to final act
Scout’s honour. Hands up, the few rights and many wrongs that cobble together the existing All-Ireland SFC are something of a personal pet peeve, but safe to say not everyone shares that fascination.
The fact is that discussions on qualifiers, provincial championships and Champions League-type groupings could be sold as a cure for insomnia if packaged correctly so rest assured this won’t be another discourse on the inequities of a system that (ok, one last dig) makes a Stalinist court appear fair and balanced.
No, this piece is about the Ulster championship and the Ulster championship only. Like its hurling cousin in Munster, the Ulster SFC is routinely lauded as one of the last bastions of provincial relevance. It is a theatre that rocks to the beat of furious local rivalries. A security blanket in a landscape ravaged by the monsters that are meaningless meetings all too frequent elsewhere on the island.
Leinster has been subjugated under Dublin’s boots for all bar one of the last eight seasons, Mayo look like they may yet lay similar waste to Connacht while Munster, well, the black sheep among the four has rarely looked as weak as it has of late on foot of the punishments meted out by Kerry and Cork.
There is certainly no denying the fervour in Ulster. This writer has been lucky enough to record the happenings at all nine Ulster grounds of a summer’s day, from Ballybofey to Belfast and Newry, and there is undoubtedly an expectation and level of intensity implicit in all of these occasions that is never quite guaranteed at most other provincial equivalents.
The Ulster Council’s insistence on holding just one senior game per week through the seven weeks from late May through to late June is another example of just why the GAA calendar chokes with such congestion problems, but what it does is serve a dependable diet of football to a hungry public.
The only problem is that the menu has long since gone stale. It’s 15 years since a county other than Armagh, Tyrone or Donegal claimed the Anglo-Celt Cup and the consensus is that Jim McGuinness’s side all but made it three-in-a-row since their opening defeat of Tyrone in Ballybofey.
It wasn’t always that way.
Six different counties claimed hegemony in Ulster in the seven years between 1992 and 1998 and, though eight have now competed in the final in the last five years — and Cavan could well make that the full nine this summer — we have witnessed a regression from outright democracy to duopoly and now a potential monopoly.
When Donegal defeated Tyrone in the provincial semi-final this time two years ago, it came seven days after Derry routed Armagh with a dazzling display of football and the headline accompanying this reporter’s report read: ‘New order in Ulster as Donegal deliver’.
The reality was, in fact, the same product wrapped in a different package.
What had been viewed as Ulster football’s equivalent of glasnost was simply the overthrow of one autocratic order by that of another. The Ulster championship, for all its continued charms, has become as predictable a production as a Hollywood sequel.
None of that is to detract from what McGuinness, his players and support staff have achieved. The manner in which the All-Ireland champions have reconfigured their DNA and morphed from serial underachievers and perceived party boys into a squad of ultra-dedicated winners remains a beacon for every team in the country.
On Sunday they will face a Down side that is, in one way, the mirror image of Donegal themselves five and 10 years ago: an outfit that can bear realistic hopes of scalping anyone on their day but one that can just as easily feel the sharp end of that same blade and all the while not knowing for sure which it will be.
As McGuinness realised a long time ago, such teams rarely get to parade around a pitch with silverware in tow and it is nigh on impossible to imagine anyone other than Michael Murphy walking up the steps of the main stand in Clones on July 21 at the end of the latest Ulster final.
Colourful? Yes. Passionate? Definitely. Gripping? At times, certainly. The Ulster championship still has so much going for it, but as long as it apes its three siblings and delivers a final act lacking in suspense it’s status as the poster boy for the provincial football championships is one to be challenged.
Email: brendan.obrien@examiner.ie
Twitter: @Rackob
