Death or glory as relegation dynamic takes hold

When Matt Le Tissier was asked recently whether he had any regrets about never moving to a bigger club, the most famous and loyal player in the history of Southampton FC explained why he hadn’t.

Throughout his entire professional career, his team were perennial favourites for relegation.

Every season trying to keep them up was something he viewed as both a challenge to relish as well as a massive personal onus.

“I felt a responsibility to the city that we were not going to get relegated,” he’d tell the journalist Graham Hunter in a podcast.

When Le Tissier finally retired after a 16-year professional career with the club’s Premier League status still intact, he was struck by a remarkable sense of relief: his job was done, his loyalty, vindicated.

Had he ever left Southampton and then watched them be relegated the following season, it would have weighed on his head much more than any discomfort of missing out on major silverware with a bigger club.

Dicing with relegation though was as thrilling as it was terrifying.

He remembers one particular campaign, 1993-94, when they seemed doomed for the drop. Then they went to Carrow Road.

Three times Norwich went ahead and three times a Le Tissier goal drew Southampton level before a last-minute Ken Monkou header gave the Saints a 5-4 win.

On the last day of the season Le Tissier scored another two goals in a 3-3 away draw to West Ham which ensured his team’s safety by a point. Afterwards a drained Le Tissier broke away from a delirious dressing room to be alone with his thoughts.

And as he sat in the sanctuary of the back seat of empty team bus, he found this huge surge of satisfaction running through him, as if, he’d tell Hunter, he had just won a Cup at Wembley.

It was a peculiar sensation but Hunter could relate to it. As an Aberdeen fan about the only season that he felt approximated the Ferguson years for sheer excitement was when the club flirted with relegation.

“The adrenaline and that sense of us against the odds – it was very seductive,” he’d tell Le Tissier. “And when we got away with it, well, the sense of glory...”

That’s something like they’ve been feeling in Cavan in recent weeks, and should they actually get away with it next weekend, well, the sense of glory and satisfaction will be greater than anything they would have experienced upon winning promotion to Division Two last year or probably even making it through to the All-Ireland quarter-finals in 2013.

You can say it’s ‘just’ the league and that there isn’t a cup in sight, but for them it will feel as they have won something.

It’s part of what makes next weekend one of the most gripping of the entire GAA calendar, just like last week was as well, and why so many of you on the terraces will have your eyes scanning Twitter as much as following the action straight in front of you.

The scrap to avoid relegation is as compelling as the chase for promotion.

Ger Loughnane’s right in saying that Clare-Dublin is the most important hurling game of the weekend, not any of the four league quarter-finals.

In football Mayo losing their Division One status would be a bigger story than Donegal and whoever else reaching the league final.

In a way that says something about the perennial limitations of the league; for everyone other than Dublin, staying in Division One is a greater priority than actually trying to win it.

But it also shows the powerful dynamic that relegation brings to the party and how it’s something that would enliven and enhance the championship.

Already it’s at play in the club championship. Ballyea’s first win on their run to Croke Park started with a dogfight against Newmarket-on- Fergus on a desperately wet night in Sixmilebridge. Both teams had already lost in the first round of the county championship.

Whoever lost in Sixmilebridge would not just find themselves out of the 2016 championship but pitted into a relegation play-off.

At that moment in time, Ballyea weren’t eyeing county titles; they were just trying to retain their senior status, something that had been regularly threatened since they emerged from the intermediate grade in 2001.

As it turned out, Newmarket would just about avoid relegation, edging out Kilmaley. Only a year earlier Kilmaley had beaten Ballyea in the county quarter-final. That’s how fleeting and merciless championship hurling can be in Clare.

Kilmaley’s place in the senior ranks this year will be taken by Doora-Barefield, a club that contested the first All Ireland final of the millennium.

Last season they won the county intermediate final, triggering scenes that the club’s renowned member and writer Christy O’Connor has compared to some of their senior successes.

All around the country there are similar stories of snakes and ladders, death and glory, relegation and promotion.

It’s everywhere in the leagues this spring too. Look at Louth and the remarkable job Colm Kelly has done there, winning a second consecutive promotion.

Next spring they’ll be playing Top 16 football week in, week out. But imagine if it was Top 16 football in the summer they were playing, up against a Cork one week and a Mayo the next?

One of the most justifications for Páraic Duffy’s Super 8 proposal was his contention that counties did not want to participate in a second-tier competition. But that’s not the case.

Counties simply didn’t want to have anything to do with the second-tier competition that had been previously proposed to them, another Tommy Murphy Cup for the bottom eight teams in the country condemning Carlow and Wicklow to yet another match against each other.

But here’s a second-tier championship they’d go for. A 16-team intermediate championship, just like the senior championship.

Two groups of eight. And it’s not just one team that would win promotion to the following year’s senior championship – three counties would.

The top side in each group – the pair of them meeting in an All-Ireland intermediate final – and then the sides in second and third facing off in a promotion semi-final playoff.

Imagine the buzz in a Longford with two round-robin games still to go, with the chance of still making a semi-final promotion playoff and the senior championship.

Or conversely, the heightened concern in a Derry knowing defeat on the last day would disqualify them from participating in the following year’s Sam Maguire.

As the championship currently stands, a Derry is just existing, floating along, waiting to be put out of Ulster by Tyrone and then out of their misery by someone else in Round two or three of the qualifiers, doesn’t matter.

But fighting for their status would jolt them, shame them out of their current apathy.

At the moment only the league provides that.

On Sunday, Derry visit Fermanagh. The loser will be relegated to Division Three, a severe blow to their reputation and standing.

Should Fermanagh win, they’ll experience that strange mix of relief and satisfaction that Le Tissier and Southampton found so familiar and intoxicating.