Is the value of winning a Munster final now diminished?
CHANCES are you’re looking forward to the Munster hurling final tomorrow if you’re from Tipperary or Waterford – or, come to think of it, from anywhere sport is enjoyed.
Enjoy it. We’re worried that the end is in sight.
The Munster final is an endangered species thanks not to the recession, to a decline in the skills of the game, or to the general decay in Irish masculinity, but to the GAA.
Only the GAA would actively try to undercut the status of one of its blue-chip marquee events, one of the few sporting events with an irresistible pedigree.
Why else would the Munster final be shunted out of a Sunday prime-time slot to facilitate a porridge of hand passing and collisions somewhere else in Ireland, as happened last year? Why would the GAA itself relegate the replay of the 2010 Munster final to a dank and rainy Saturday evening (we’re aware that the GAA has no authority over the weather, but as we learned in Mr Duffy’s English class long ago, that is an example of the sympathetic fallacy).
The best answer we could come up with was a ham-fisted effort to prepare the way for an open draw in hurling.
The worst answer we could come up with was confirmation of a long-standing suspicion, that hurling is viewed as a boutique oddity within the corridors of power in Croke Park, one that occupies the Sundays when Gaelic football is not available.
The reason given by the GAA authorities for having that game on a Saturday evening at that time, rather than a Sunday, was to avoid a clash with an Ulster SFC final, after all.
Taking the second answer above as read, we worry, in this corner of the country, that the panjandrums of Croke Park were testing the water for the abolition, gradual or sudden, of provincial championships in favour of some kind of open draw, free-for-all among counties. Or – God between us and all harm – the oft-touted ‘champions league format’, which is a shorthand in my house for buffalo sedative, it works that quickly as a soporific.
In either case, there’s a lesson there for the Munster hurling counties: you have done your job too well.
Within the GAA the Munster final’s position stands alone on top. Remind us at your leisure of the great Ulster football finals, or the great Leinster hurling finals. The outstanding Connacht finals or the many and varied line-ups for the Munster football final? Send us a postcard. You’ll only need the space covered by the stamp.
There’s been a systems failure in other provinces — and other codes — with lopsided competition and declining interest. That’s not the fault of anyone involved in the Munster hurling championship, but the most competitive provincial series within the GAA may end up carrying the can.
The sad irony is that the Munster championship has never been more attractive: Limerick are revived under Donal O’Grady; Clare are wounded and unhappy now, but their U21s will come through, augmented by tomorrow’s minor side; Cork will always be competitive at the least and will hope to be better than that; Tipperary are All-Ireland champions, playing an irresistibly attractive brand of hurling; and Waterford go into tomorrow’s final as Munster champions, with some players looking for a fifth provincial title – hardly conceivable 10 years ago.
It was significant last year that the Munster Council itself was very unhappy with the Saturday night fixture, and that its representative said as much.
They know quality when they see it, like those of us privileged enough to have been reared on games in the Munster hurling championship.
Here’s hoping there’ll be more of them, but we’re not convinced.
THE episode is titled Communication Problems and is from the second series of Fawlty Towers. In it Mrs Richards, a cranky old female resident, is complaining about the view from her room. Basil, dripping sarcasm as only Basil can, responds: “May I ask what you expected to see out of a Torquay hotel bedroom window? Sydney Opera House, perhaps? The Hanging Gardens of Babylon? Herds of wildebeest sweeping majestically?”
Or to put it another way: what exactly are you expecting from the Munster final tomorrow?
What you’re likely to get is a good competitive match watched by a full house of 43,000 spectators and analysed from every conceivable angle in the media for the next two days. What you won’t get is Ring and Mackey descending from the clouds and giving us a game fit for the gods.
As long as you don’t do a Mrs Richards on it by expecting the latter, you won’t be disappointed if you end up with the former.
Ochóning that the Munster final isn’t what it used to be, and never will be again, should be left to old-timers, wannabe purists and those who swallowed the hype in the first place.
Exactly “what it used to be” — well, that’s an argument in itself. To what extent the magic of the Munster final was a media construct, the creation of excitable journalists, is a story for another day.
But take it as a given that the sun didn’t always shine, the meat teas didn’t always taste like nectar, the dust didn’t always rise in the square and the hurling didn’t always live up to the publicity.
There are valid grounds for asserting that in the half-century following Wexford’s rise at the start of the 1950s the Leinster final provided consistently better hurling than its more storied southern counterpart.
“It’s undeniable,” wrote John O’Grady — Culbaire of the Tipperary Star — in 1984, “even to those of us to whom the very phrase ‘Munster final’ has a thrilling ring, that in more recent years the Leinster one was too frequently the better of the two.”
Thing was, the Leinster final never had its own Raymond Smith.
Still, trying to deflate the barrage balloon of mystique that surrounds the Munster final — paradoxically the main plank in the argument that the event is not in terminal decline — brings an obvious problem.
Where does one draw the line? How often can you claim the Munster final is an overrated event before one gets to the point of underrating it? Tomorrow’s renewal will attract a sellout crowd. Hmm, clearly the old dear is on her last legs. Quick, call the doctor now!
That the Munster championship would suffer as a byproduct of the installation of the back door was inevitable; it is too late now to cry over spilled milk. Cork winning the All-Ireland in 2004 without winning Munster en route was one nail in the coffin, Tipperary doing likewise last year another.
Yet it is a tribute to the competition’s enduring glamour that it has not become irrelevant. Winning Munster remains the shortest cut to the All-Ireland series. And hurling needs showpiece games; the Munster final is that with knobs on.
Take as a reference point next Sunday’s Connacht football final. They’ll descend on Hyde Park in their droves for it even though Mayo and Roscommon will get about as close to Sam this year as I’m likely to get to Beyoncé’s knicker elastic (sorry, that’s a preposterous comparison; I’ll get far closer). Think that will bother the supporters? Not a bit of it.
What the Munster championship most needs in the next year or two is a new team challenging, a modern equivalent to Loughnane’s Clare. Where we’ll be tomorrow afternoon is no bad place nonetheless. No opera houses, no hanging gardens, no majestic wildebeest, but every prospect of a match to savour.
Appreciate the Munster final for what it is. Don’t damn it for no longer being what you were led to believe it used to be.
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