John Fogarty: The worst leagues in recent memory

Mon, 20 Mar, 2023 - 07:15

There are enough reasons to be thankful for David Clifford without him cutting through the bull about this year’s Allianz Football League.
There he was on Saturday evening telling it like it is about a competition that has all the charm of a naked, grotesque emperor.

“A lot of the games take on a similar pattern in terms of teams getting men behind the ball so it’s very hard to get momentum up,” he told TG4 when asked about Kerry’s topsy-turvy form. “Every game ends very close, just with the nature of teams conceding kick-outs and stuff like that.”
The uniformity in approach taken by teams and the generic pattern of games have been contributing factors to this being one of the most disappointing Allianz Football Leagues in recent memory. Margins are unreliable as metrics of competition when, as Clifford rightly points out, almost every leading county is doing the same monotonous thing of retreating, absorbing and either breaking or building. Spontaneity may as well be a sin.
At this stage last year, there were 36 goals scored in the first five rounds of Division 1. There have been five less this season. One team, Mayo, account for over 35% of them. Just how many of this year’s Division 1 goals have come by way of out-and-out goalkeeper errors? The two in Box-It Athletic Grounds on Saturday, for two. Shane Ryan’s in O’Neills Healy Park was another.
As pointed out in these pages recently, the eight best teams in the country do not comprise Division 1 right now and it surely shows but then the frigid football played for a lot of the Dublin-Derry game in Celtic Park earlier this month wouldn’t suggest the quality would improve with the pair’s inclusion.
For all the genuine criticism of the hurling league and its dearth of consequence, for all there is riding on the football competition, it has only been marginally better. And before anyone starts bleating on about sell-out crowds such as Navan and Derry, consider the novelty of the occasions and the Harlem Globetrotter effect of Dublin – none of their players were alive when the county last played Meath in a league game in Páirc Tailteann.
Factor in too the unprecedently six-month yearning for inter-county fare. And if anyone tells you that the supposed white-hot Division 2 was where it’s at, all but one of the four promotion/relegation positions has been confirmed. Come to think of it, half of the 14 final/promotion/relegation places have been filled with a round to go.
And if somebody has the audacity to claim that Division 1 has been thrilling, that four teams could yet claim the second league final spot at the same time all but Mayo and Galway could go down, you are being gaslit. Except for Mayo’s exuberance and Galway’s grit these last two games, the banality and coiled character of Division 1 games has been mind-numbing.
Entertainment is so often mistaken for quality but this league has been shorn of both. The GAA’s media partners have to sell their wares but the superfluous adjectives used to either mask or make excuses for the ugliness that was shown over the weekend was a poor reflection on them.
What Armagh and Galway served up on Saturday was never going to distract most neutrals from the Grand Slam bid but spare us hailing the virtues of the home team’s attacking attributes when they can muster one point for the opening 20 minutes and can't score for the 35 regulation minutes of the second half.
And when the only hurling game of note in the final round of Division 1 involves two teams possibly up to half their championship teams, there is a problem. The Kilkenny-Waterford meeting was the pick of a bad bunch. That it did not even merit live coverage when football’s penultimate round received four live slots across TG4 and RTÉ said plenty about the disinterest in it. That’s what you get when winning the league becomes disincentivised.
When survival trumps success, when hurling's league is less important than its provincial round-robin and now football’s plays second fiddle to its new championship version, these winter/spring competitions are facing an existential crisis.
The GAA’s gate receipts won’t tell them how bad these last seven weeks have been. In fact, they are likely to tell a completely different story because of the wait for inter-county Gaelic games and outliers like Dublin in Division 2.
It will be felt the ticket price increase has been justified and they might not be persuaded to do anything about the structures of the leagues. But if the bottom line for one exceptional year dictates their policy and two ailing competitions that have yet to reflect the split season are left to wither on the vine then they are in for a sharp lesson.

Munster SFC set to heat up

We may have been casting the rod last year when highlighting that Munster were the strongest football province in the country.
Still, on the back of Kerry winning the league, Clare retaining their Division 2 status for a seventh year straight, Cork avoiding the drop, Limerick joining them and Tipperary jumping to Division 3, there were plenty of reasons to be positive. Throw in three counties reaching the All-Ireland quarter-finals and 16 All-Stars nominations and the future appeared rosy.
Twelve months on from that great league return and the province had one of its most humbling weekends as Clare and Limerick went down together and Cork’s Sam Maguire Cup hopes via the league were dented. Waterford did pick up a first win in 13 games and Kerry moved further away from relegation bother in Division 1 but in the main it was a dark weekend for Munster football.
On the flipside, it should mean the non-Kerry side of the draw is set to be tastier seeing as it is the only means by which way Clare and Limerick can play in the All-Ireland series. It may also turn out to be Cork’s best opportunity too if results don’t go their way this weekend in Páirc Uí Chaoimh and St Conleth’s Park.
With the prospect of facing Cork in Cusack Park in three weeks’ time, Clare manager Colm Collins was taking the right approach speaking to Clare FM after a chastening defeat to Derry in Owenbeg. “The important thing is to lift these fellas up for next weekend and put in a solid display against Limerick because we (will then) have championship in two weeks.”
Cork’s John Cleary wasn’t too concerned with missing out on a Sam Maguire Cup spot via the league: “The worst we can finish is fifth and it would want to take a lot of strange results to put us out of the Sam Maguire."

Strange but not outlandish as matters become more delicate.

No hurling country for older me?

Maybe it’s all coincidental but news of 33-year-old David Burke’s season-ending cruciate injury on top of a setback over the weekend for Seamus Harnedy (32) and doubts about the availability of Patrick Horgan and Seamus Callanan (both 34) for upcoming championship raises the question of the split season’s added impact on veteran players.
Accepted, Callanan’s medial problem against Waterford could have happened to anyone, but is it any wonder TJ Reid (35) is being wrapped in cotton wool and John Conlon (33) only made his first appearance of the season in a much-needed Round 3 win over Wexford? Limerick’s Graeme Mulcahy (33) has also been absent.
Callanan, sidelined for the entirety of last year, needed game-time as Patrick “Bonner” Maher (33) has having been sidelined for a long period but going back over the years March has been a notorious month for knee injuries in the inter-county game.
Burke may not have started every game but his experience, with Joe Canning’s retirement still being felt in Galway, coming off the bench would have been most welcome for Henry Shefflin. And as Reid said recently, “ If you leave a number define your career, even life in general, you’re playing on a losing battlefield straight away.”
And yet we’re reminded of former Cork centre-back Ronan Curran retiring 12 years ago at the age of 30, explaining that hurling had become “a young man’s game”. If that’s what it was back then, what is it now?

Email: john.fogarty@examiner.ie