Kieran Shannon: Are you ready? It’s time to embrace the GAA’s new normal
Cork’s Patrick Horgan in action against Limerick duo Tom Morrissey and Gearóid Hegarty in the All-Ireland SHC final at Croke Park last August. The Championship comes back around in April. Picture: Ray McManus/Sportsfile
Remember club month? How April 1 was meant to signify four weeks of next to no inter-county activity only for it to make a fool out of some folk and everyone else just outright cranky, giving out about how out of touch Croke Park were with the grassroots, how the county game had become a behemoth, or how long a layoff their county had between league and championship?
Now, hallelujah, in the year of our Lord and David Clifford 2022, there is no such acrimony. No more CPA versus GPA, or club versus county, or 10-week layoffs with teams killing time and thus themselves, being subjected or subjecting themselves to another torturous pre-season. No more April being neither one thing nor the other, a doldrums, a no more no-man’s land with its phoney wars and endless challenge game circuits. Easter Sunday, instead of being a day to blow out some dirty petrol that Darragh used to talk about, is now the Indianapolis 500: try handing out – or at least getting – tickets when Cork and Limerick bolt from the starting line in the Páirc and Tipp come to Walsh Park. April now means championship. April is the new May.
It will take a bit of getting used to, this new calendar, new rhythm, new vernacular. This new new normal.
Sure we’ve had All-Ireland finals played in December and August the past two years. But they were always going to be outliers. So much else of our sporting and daily lives have returned to what they were pre-pandemic. The Masters starts on Thursday week, back in its rightful place, not in November like it did in 2020. The following week the NBA playoffs commence, again in their usual slot, and not in some autumnal bubble in Orlando. The Open Championship has its usual tee time of mid-July. This column was reared on coming back from Munster finals and hearing on the train or in the car who had lifted the Claret Jug. Three years ago when Shane Lowry ended up being its recipient we were channel-hopping between his exploits at Royal Portrush and a round-two Super 8s shootout between Kerry and Donegal in Croker. This year the Liam MacCarthy Cup will be handed out the same day as the Claret Jug is. July is the new September.
Teams no longer have ambitions to “play football into August”, old code for wanting to reach the All-Ireland quarter-finals at least. Because no one will be playing football into August, at least not with their county (unless the All Ireland goes to a replay: August you could say is the new October). They’ll all be back playing champo for the club by then. All has changed, changed utterly.
Well, not everything. There is still that old perennial which will possibly grow all the louder after coming out of Croker next Sunday: Will Galway bate Mayo? (Not if they’ve back Cillian O’.) Only we’ll know the answer a week before the summer officially begins – April 24 – rather than at the start or height of it as we normally would. Cork and Kerry will play each other in May, the first time in 30 years we’ve had that, and only the second time in 88. The rivalries might remain the same but the dates will not.
So let us help you get your head around all this: what’s somewhat familiar and what all else seems so new.
As was the case in 2018 and 2019, the hurling provincial round-robin championships will leave the football in the shade for the first seven or so weeks, albeit not to possibly the same extent as was the case those two specific years. Sunday, April 24 should be a tasty day’s football: apart from Galway-Mayo out west, you’ll have Donegal-Armagh in Ballybofey, the kind of double bill the last two pre-Covid early provincial rounds couldn’t muster. But even that weekend hurling at least equals it with Tipp-Clare on the Sunday following Limerick-Waterford on the Saturday.
The following few weekends should feature at least one football game to look forward to (May 1 most likely Derry v Tyrone with the winners then likely playing Monaghan on May 15 in the semi-final) but otherwise than the rule is simple: from Easter Super Sunday up until the last weekend of May, hurling will rule.
By May 22 two from Limerick, Waterford, Cork, Tipp, and Clare will have played their last hurling championship game of 2022, a throwback to the old do-or-die days, only thankfully this time they’ll have had four games and no excuses after such an early exit. The provincial hurling finals will be played on the first weekend of June instead of its last weekend as we had back in 2019. The All-Ireland semi-finals will be played on the first weekend of July. You could say it’s all hurling in a hurry only that’s not strictly the case: while the past two championships Limerick benefitted from only having a two-week lay-off between winning Munster and playing their All Ireland semi-final, now any provincial champion is back to waiting four weeks, a dangerous wait as history has overwhelmingly shown.
After a slow, meandering start the football will take off on the last weekend of May and never really slow down. On Saturday May 28, you’ll have the Munster and Leinster final; then on the Sunday, Connacht and Ulster.
The following weekend (June 4-5) then you’ll have the start of the qualifiers, which lest we forget, will feature little to no fodder as the same weekend will also see the inaugural round of the inaugural Tailteann Cup. In a way it’s the perfect mix. Instead of being condemned to the usual road-to-nowhere, the teams in the hat for that first round of the Tailteann Cup can and should have Croker in their eyes, while the qualifiers – once loved but recently maligned – will get the send-off it deserves 21 years on from it initially breathing so much life back into the championship.
In fact its last year could be among its best. This year for whoever loses Galway-Mayo there will be no nice, easy game or hand-up to help them get back on the horse. The next day out they could well be meeting whoever loses Donegal-Armagh or any two of Tyrone, Derry, or Monaghan. Instead of the usual four rounds of qualifiers, this year there are only two: the eight teams that didn’t reach the provincial finals in the first round, and then the four winners from that pitted against the four provincial runners-up.
By June 26, there will be only four teams standing in the race for Sam Maguire after the completion of the All-Ireland quarter-finals – 10 years ago on that same date that number was 32. July football back then represented getting past the first round of the qualifiers. Now it means making it to at least an All Ireland semi-final – or a Tailteann Cup final.
It’s going to take a bit of getting used to all right – and possibly be over before you do. So hold on to your hat and that new calendar you’ve just been given. It’s going to be some first ride and the good or frightening news is it’s almost here already.
