Championship Preview: The 10 most important hurling matches. Ever

Someday someone will do a feature, perhaps even a book on the 10 greatest hurling matches ever played. This is not that feature. Instead it’s a catalogue of the matches that mattered most, the encounters that helped fashion the code into what it is today. In hurling terms this means there’s no room for the 1947 All Ireland final, deemed for decades afterwards to be the apotheosis of the species. The Cork/Galway extravaganza of September 1990 is similarly absent, as are the Kilkenny/Tipperary encounters of recent years that shook mountains. We wouldn’t argue for a moment that for drama and sheer madcap entertainment both the 2004 Munster final and the 2005 All Ireland semi-final (Galway 5-18 Kilkenny 4-18) were leagues ahead of the 2006 MacCarthy Cup showpiece, yet the latter is unquestionably the most critical hurling match to take place so far this century.