Kieran Shannon: Provincial slant and no backdoor puts football in hurling’s shadow
BACK IN THE DAY: Westmeath's Cathal Keane and Wexford's David Murphy battle for possesion in their qualifier clash in 2001, the first ever year of football qualifiers. Picture: Ray McManus/Sportsfile
It hasn’t even got a mention, drowned out in the deluge of pieces celebrating the 30th anniversary of the start of the immortal Dublin-Meath four-game saga, but this week also happens to be the significant birthday of not just another historic GAA watershed moment but two.
Twenty years ago, on the weekend of June 9-10, we had the first-ever round of football qualifiers and the last time hurling teams would have no backdoor after losing a game in the provincial championships.
The inaugural set of football backdoor games, played on the Saturday evening, was an immediate success. In Wexford Park, a Westmeath team that was coming off winning Division Two (though it would be the equivalent of Division Three now) and had only lost their previous championship game by a point to a recent All-Ireland champion in Meath, had to come from nine points down to draw with the hosts, 1-19 apiece, after extra-time. The locals flooded onto the pitch afterwards, basking in the novelty of a Saturday evening shootout, while the visitors were in good form too. Instead of the usual one-game-and-that’s-it for the summer, they’d have at least three.
As it happened, Luke Dempsey’s team would go on to have eight games that magical summer of 2001, beating not just Wexford in the replay, but a few weeks later beating reigning national league champions Mayo in another overtime game before then bringing Meath to another replay in the All- Ireland quarter-final stage. While they wouldn’t have a trophy to show for it, their remarkable run the way they would have for winning Leinster under Páidí in 2004, everyone, including Páidí himself, would appreciate there wouldn’t have been a 2004 only for 2001 — and there being a backdoor in 2001.
The day after that dramatic first football qualifier in Wexford Park, our entire attention turned to the small ball. For the third consecutive week, Páirc Uí Chaoimh would have the full house sign up hosting a do-or-die Munster championship game.
A fortnight earlier the Cork hurlers were gone in 70 minutes, or 35 minutes in the case of an injury-hampered Brian Corcoran, the county’s finest hurler in a generation deciding he was no longer going to put his life on hold for the promise of just one championship match.
Now the winners from that game, Limerick, were facing off against Waterford to see who would win through to play Tipperary, themselves the winner of a claustrophobic Munster semi-final the previous week when they scraped past Clare by a solitary point.
All these years on and we can still vividly see plays and players from the losing team in those games. Diarmuid O’Sullivan bulldozing a hapless Limerick forward before driving the ball over a bar in another country. A skinheaded debutant by the name of John Mullane tormenting the Limerick defence before he’d to cry off injured and they’d reel in an 11-point deficit to win by a goal themselves. But the most vivid images of the lot are of two Clare players after the final whistle: Davy Fitzgerald, not for the last time, haranguing a referee, in this case Dickie Murphy after the Wexford man had made several marginal calls that hadn’t fallen the way of Clare, while at the other end of the pitch an ashen-faced and shirtless Jamesie O’Connor trodding towards the tunnel.
Later they would both explain the source of their anguish and frustration. “I couldn’t understand some of the decisions against us,” Fitzgerald would explain to reporters back when they had post-match dressing room access. “You train hard five or six nights a week all year and then you end up with this.”
O’Connor, who had scored five points from play in a match where every other score from play was carved from granite — what’s a half-time score these days — 0-15 to 0-14 — was the full-time score that day — reflected on how the shame wasn’t so much a Munster title had evaporated. A win, he said, “would have guaranteed hurling through the summer”. Now defeat to the team who they’d also played in the previous month’s league final had terminated that possibility.
There would be some consolation for O’Connor. At the end of that year, he would win an All Star, the last man ever to do so on the back of just one championship game. But it was scant consolation. He’d nearly have traded it in for the sake of playing a few more games in one of his prime years. Instead, while Tipp would go on to play right through that summer, arguably the second-best team in the country were gone after just one game.
Thankfully that can’t happen in hurling now, even in campaigns compromised by Covid. Last winter another Clareman who lit it up in a first-round defeat would not only still win his All Star, but Tony Kelly would get the chance to follow up on his 0-17 tally against Limerick by going for even more against Wexford a few weeks later. He’d get to play right through the winter and we’d have the privilege of seeing him instead of a precious prime year of his going to waste. This year it’s the same. Even if Clare are to go a 23rd consecutive year without winning a Munster title, any defeat in their provincial championship won’t be the last we’ll see of Kelly this summer.
Unfortunately the same does not apply in football. While some of Kelly’s clubmates like Cillian Brennan and Pierse Lillis are part of a ferociously competitive and consistent team masterfully managed by Colm Collins, the harsh reality of it is that either they or David Clifford will walk out of Fitzgerald Stadium on June 26, their championship over for the second consecutive year after just one game.
Such a sobering thought doesn’t really chime with the current narrative around football or indeed its sibling sport. At the moment while hurling seems the sport having a crisis of identity, the mood around football is strikingly giddy. Every pundit or podcast you listen to is salivating at the prospect of Ulster teams — pick any of Donegal, Tyrone, Monaghan, Armagh, even possibly Derry — as well as Kerry having a crack at the Dubs now that all those sides are seemingly less inhibited and more attack-minded. Even this weekend’s league action is an appetising starter that has them craving the main course that’s Championship. The only dampener — and criticism of the GAA — according to everyone from Gooch to Oisín seems to be that there’ll be so few if any league finals.
Looking at the bigger picture though, some of their excitement as well as concerns appear misplaced. Who wins a Division Two, Three, or Four title and final does not — and never really has — mattered much; in those divisions, all that matters is who wins promotion and who avoids relegation, something that this will weekend will provide and decide. The only shame and slight on the GAA when it’s come to this league is that there isn’t a Division One final. With time of the essence, this weekend there should have been dedicated to such a match instead of a pair of semi-finals whose winners might never square off.
No, the real competition flaw this year is that for a second consecutive year there will be no backdoor for footballers while there is one provided for hurlers. With a bit — and only a bit — of imagination and flexibility (along the lines suggested by this column on March 23), the GAA could have ensured at least a couple of championship games for every player and team, but, as few former players-now pundits seem to have noticed, the authorities decided to prioritise the sanctity of the provincial championships.
It didn’t have to be this way. The LGFA and camogie have ensured we’ll have a summer of the best playing the best in their sports and parking the provincial championships for the year.
But in football, for the second straight year, we’ll have just three games featuring teams playing someone from outside their province.
Again, it’s a point that’s been overlooked. By not having All-Ireland quarter-finals, the only Ulster team that can play a Dublin is one who beats the Munster champions — Kerry, in the eyes of most — in an All-Ireland semi-final. It can’t be both. We’re salivating at all these possible match-ups after the provinces are done (as absolutely no one is looking forward to Leinster, and Munster is seemingly a procession for Kerry) when in truth it’s just a game or two. Dublin-Mayo has been one of the greatest rivalries in football history but after the way their two last championship clashes petered out, is that an All-Ireland semi-final we all want to see?
In that sense, maybe this week’s Division One semi-finals and relegation play-offs are to be welcomed. In those four games we’ll have more cross-provincial games than we’ll have all championship.
With less cross-provincial games, football will likely be in hurling’s shadow for most of the summer. The complete opposite of the summer of 20 years ago.
