Club link could save ailing interprovincial championship

The author of a new book on interprovincial hurling believes running the finals as curtain-raisers to All-Ireland club deciders is the only way to keep the competition alive.

Kilkenny man Dermot Kavanagh has written a comprehensive history of the competition, chartering its halcyon days in the 1950s and ‘60s to its dramatic decline in the 2000s.

Hailing from Rower-Inistioge, Kavanagh’s love for the Railway Cup stems back to when his hero Ollie Walsh, then 19, came on a substitute for Leinster in the 1957 final against Munster. He remembers as a child being promised he would be brought to finals providing he behaved himself and how representing one’s province was “the equivalent of an international cap”.