No guarantees with underage success

DUBLIN’S hurling day looks to be coming — but we wonder about the sense of inevitability that has grown up around the matter in some quarters.

“All-Irelands are not that aisy won,” as the man said. Underage success does not automatically lead to senior glory — and, side by side with reports of Dublin’s emergence as an underage force, you will find many studies of why Galway are unable to translate youthful dominance into something more substantial up the line.

As Galway know only too well, no underage system brings senior guarantees. So many other imponderables enter the equation: the quality of the senior management at any given time being just one, not to mention the enthusiasm of key players, the availability of suitable employment and many others.

It takes a mammoth effort to win an All-Ireland senior title. Dublin have been making such an effort and they have arrived close to the top, but it will take an equally powerful surge to bring them fully over the line.

Of course, we know we’re not telling them anything they don’t already know, nor are we arguing for them to kill their under-age momentum. We’re just making the point.

The trend is certainly Dublin’s friend. But the trend was Salthill’s friend too when, in 1990, they won their first-ever Galway senior football championship. Such was the ease with which they defeated Corofin by 14 points that the Connacht Tribune predicted that Salthill would dominate the Galway senior championship for a decade.

But it didn’t turn out that way. The following year, Corofin drew with Salthill in the final. And Corofin won the replay.

And it was another 15 years before Salthill (adding Knocknacarra to their name by this stage) would win another Galway championship. In the meantime, Corofin, their sorry victims in 1990, would win further titles in 1993, 1995, 1997, 1998, 2000 and 2002.

Just saying.