No news is good news as fixtures take toll

I RANG He Who Must Be Obeyed on the Sports desk Monday morning to sort out the menu for this week, to be greeted by a voice that sounded like it was coming from beyond the grave.

Have a think back to your Irish Examiner of yesterday and understand why — a clutter of All-Ireland football qualifiers, two huge hurling qualifiers, Ulster football finals, Leinster football finals, inter-county camogie action, all the club activity in the various counties, and that was just the GAA championship supplement!

Add the Pádraig Harrington heroics to the mix, stir in all the various other sports covered so comprehensively by this paper, and I think you’ll begin to appreciate why there was such utter exhaustion among those who steer this ship. Tom Aherne, the chief sports sub, once described it to me as like working on a fast-moving assembly line in a factory where you produce a different product every day, an assembly line that never stops.

On the GAA scene of late, as the All-Ireland qualifiers really kick into gear, that line has been moving faster and faster, barely time to draw breath after one week of heavy fallers before we’re called back into action again.

Unfortunately, I missed Saturday’s hurling action, with a family wedding taking precedence (and best of luck to my brother-in-law Ronán Henderson, Jackeen and Hill 16 regular, and his wife Paula, in their new journey), and by all accounts I missed a couple of really good games, one cracker.

Hoping to catch as much of the action as I could, I tuned into The Sunday Game, where — understandably — most of the programme was taken up with the two provincial football finals held that day. When it came to the hurling we were presented with some of the highlights, which left a taste for much more, and then came the panel discussion, which didn’t, to put things very bluntly.

I’m wondering now, has it become a prime part of Pat Spillane’s brief that he has to badger the panellists to provide an opinion on every single incident? On the hurling especially, is it Pat himself or is it a producer in his ear who pushes and prods, prompting little comments like ‘But it’s striking, isn’t that a red card offence?’, when all that has taken place is a little pushing.

Most of Pat’s panellists are former top-class hurlers, or in Cyril Farrell’s case, an All-Ireland winning coach — you can see them squirming, ducking, diving, dodging, when they should just tell the man, straight up, ‘Shut it Pat this IS just handbags stuff.’

Invariably, those items are introduced with a comment about ‘some controversial incidents’; the only reason many of these incidents are controversial is because The Sunday Game producers have decided to make them so. Please lads, give us a break, get down off the high moral ground. Unless there’s been injury or real controversy, leave it alone.

THE MOST positive thing to emerge from all these All-Ireland qualifiers, and this would apply to both sports, is that you don’t have to be confined to provincial championships, or to All-Ireland semi-finals or finals, to witness real quality in the matches. In their last two games against top Munster teams, Offaly have been outstanding; beat Limerick conclusively and might have beaten Waterford on Saturday but for two soft goals conceded in the first half.

Yet when they meet Kilkenny in Leinster, they freeze. Last year, having again capitulated to Kilkenny in the Leinster final, Wexford came out and beat Tipperary in the All-Ireland quarter-final. Next weekend now they meet Waterford in another All-Ireland quarter-final — what odds that, having again been hammered by Kilkenny in another Leinster final, they will again up their performance, put up a real challenge to Waterford? Again and again I have argued here, we don’t NEED provincial championships to have a good All-Ireland series. It’s inarguably true, that the Munster hurling championship has thrown up many, many classics over the decades, that it has become an institution on its own; it’s true also that Ulster football enjoys its own annual local argument.

But the Munster hurling teams proved last year in the All-Ireland qualifiers that they will play just as competitively against each other outside Munster as they will inside. Cork and Waterford, twice, in the All-Ireland quarter-final, Waterford and Limerick in the All-Ireland semi-final — remember those? These are magnificent games, these All-Ireland qualifiers, we should show more appreciation. Monaghan/Derry, Kildare/Cavan, Limerick hammering Meath, Tyrone, Donegal, Westmeath all still in the football mix — look at all the big games still to come, and enjoy.

As for all the lads in the cockpit of the Examiner, well, September is just around the corner.

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