Real action still begins when tour of provinces ends
For five years through the core of that decade, the men and women based in their Portlaoise offices seemed to take the view that if there was a provincial football championship game to be played in their neck of the woods then, by heck, it would be played in HQ regardless of the identity of the counties involved, the stage of the competition or likely attendance figures.
Between 2003 and 2007, 44 of Leinster’s 68 football fixtures were held in Dublin 2, 64% of the total, with the height of the madness coming in 2005 when nine out of their 10 games that year were ring-fenced for a stadium that was invariably reduced to the status of echo chamber.
It hadn’t always been so.
In 2002, only two of the province’s fixtures had been earmarked for Croker. So eager had the Leinster Council been back then to spread football’s gospel around the province that they even attempted to convert the heathens in Kilkenny with a meeting between Kildare and Offaly at Nowlan Park.
They even took the replay back there.
A middle ground has been found in more recent years.
In 2013, half of the games were sprinkled around between Aughrim, Mullingar, Drogheda and Portlaoise with the rest catered for in Jones’ Road, but the reduction, welcome as it is, has now served to reinforce the impression that thefootball championship doesn’t really get going until all eyes turn towards HQ.
More and more we are hearing the refrain that the chase for Sam Maguire doesn’t really kick off until the last eight teams left standing congregate in the capital over two or three days on the August Bank Holiday weekend and the course of events this last two months has only exaggerated that belief still further.
To date we have had 43 games of football on which to ponder and 14 of them — slightly less than one-third — have been double-digit blowouts, starting with Leitrim’s stroll around the Bronx back in May and continuing all the way through to the Connacht county’s painful 27-point loss to Armagh last week.
Laois, too, have experienced both ends of that spectrum, caving by 10 points to Louth in their Leinster opener before posting a combined winning margin of 27 points from their trips to Carlow and Ennis, while Cork and Kerry took a scorched earth policy to the rest of Munster before meeting in the decider.
The only segment to have insulated itself from all these landslide victories has been the Ulster championship, but only because the fare on offer there this summer has been scarred by an even more virulent strain of defensiveness than usual and one that is expected to infect the final between Donegal and Monaghan on Sunday.
Half the counties are already conducting their post-mortems after recent championship exits and there has yet to be a single game to truly capture the imagination.
It has also been football’s misfortune that hurling’s renaissance has cast such a state of affairs in a harsher light than would usually be the case.
How ironic, too, that the one story to have generated anything approaching real excitement — London’s defeats of Sligo and Leitrim and progress through to a first Connacht final — is only likely to add to the general doom and gloom given they face obliteration at the hands of the Mayo juggernaut in Castlebar this weekend.
The sneaky suspicion is that the plots of the hurling and football championships have been much too black and white thus far, however, and it would be no great surprise should Kilkenny quell all talk of another revolution by triumphing again come September and for the football to explode into life as the summer leaks into autumn.
Unfortunately, that just won’t happen until the 32 county grounds are stood down from inter-county duties for the rest of the year and the All-Ireland football championship is contested for on one patch of land nestled neatly on the north side of the capital.
We may well be blown away by the big ball in the weeks to come but that won’t change the fact that the real championship has been condensed into a six- or seven-week window, one where everything that comes before it is no more important in the greater scheme of things than a McGrath or O’Byrne Cup.
What a shame that is.
Twitter: @Rackob
email: brendan.obrien@examiner.ie
