Galway can be forgiven a wry smile at Munster woes

There was a time, back in the late 1990s and throughout most of the 2000s, when every Galway defeat was followed by plaintive calls from the vanquished westerners to change the system.

Mattie Murphy or Noel Lane or whichever Galway manager had just lost would emerge from the defeated dressing room, confront the phalanx of dictaphones awaiting comment, and attempt to argue the benefits of an ‘open draw’, preferably without coming off a sore loser.

The ‘open draw’, now rebranded as the ‘Champions League-style format’, was the rallying cry of Galway hurling for years.