Terrible beauty of the qualifiers

It was a gentleman by the name of HL Mencken, a 20th century American journalist, satirist and commentator known as ‘The Sage of Baltimore’, who once declared that he hated all sports “as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense”.

Mencken may have painted that particular picture with a ridiculously wide brush, but to look at an All-Ireland football championship designed — if that is the appropriate word — by committee and compromise is to think that maybe the man was on to something after all.

Not exactly the most ordered or logical of competitions for the first 120 or so years of its existence, the race to capture the Sam Maguire took on an even more unwieldy and random hue after the turn of the millennium with the advent of the qualifiers.