GAA schedule has turned football v hurling into the new Blur v Oasis

A lot of adolescent angst was projected into Albarn v Gallagher. Now there are shades of that collision course in the GAA inter-county scene.

Composite picture of Liam and Noel Gallagher (left) of Oasis and Damon Albarn of Blur. Photos: Getty

For those of who were then in our impressionable teens, the summer of 1995 is a vivid period of nostalgia.

There was no room for nuance in Blur vs Oasis. The bands were hardly members of a mutual admiration society and you followed suit. You either had a harrington or a cagoule jacket. You didn't have both. 

You were bourgeoisie or proletariat, a Jet or a Shark. Or, as Fr Damo so wonderfully articulated to Fr Dougal, “Oasis or Blur?” 

A lot of adolescent angst was projected into Albarn v Gallagher. The antipathy came to a head in August that year when Blur brought forward the release of their single Country House to clash with Oasis’s Roll With It. 

And as much as the front-lines were across the Irish Sea and there the victors would be decided, you tried to do your bit for the cause here. Your £10 pocket money was surrendered purchasing two whole singles.

Jump forward 30 years and there are shades of that collision course in the GAA inter-county scene this weekend. Last Sunday week, the Ulster Council rescheduled their showpiece event from a 1.45pm start on Sunday to this Saturday evening, clashing with a Clare v Tipperary Munster SHC Round 3 game that had been set in stone since January.

Ulster GAA did so to facilitate a final double-header with the Armagh and Donegal ladies providing the support act – they would have faced a morning throw-in otherwise – but matters in Ennis would hardly have crossed their minds never mind hurling. The province has two counties – Antrim and Down – in Division 1B next year and yet the Ulster hurling championship has not been played since 2017.

The small ball game doesn’t seem to be in the thoughts of enough GAA leaders right now. On Saturday, there will be 10 championship hurling game, three on Sunday. A couple of the Liam MacCarthy Cup teams have requested playing on the first day of weekend but that doesn’t fully explain why almost the entire hurling programme has been shoehorned into one day. These, unfortunately are not isolated events. The weekend after next, 13 will be staged on Saturday and four on Sunday.

Hurling’s hurt has caused by its own hand too. Much like the Tailteann Cup does the Sam Maguire Cup, the Joe McDonagh Cup should run concurrently to the Liam MacCarthy Cup. Playing it like a blitz to feed into the All-Ireland preliminary quarter-finals is self-defeating and those two "last eight" games in the second week of June are an abomination.

Excluding the outlier of Laois beating Dublin in 2019, the current average winning margin for McCarthy teams v McDonagh across nine preliminary quarter-final matches stands at 17 points. And we’re still led to believe the best two McDonagh teams are more worthy of knock-out places in the MacCarthy Cup than the fourth-placed sides in Leinster and Munster.

But like this weekend’s fixtures clash, there is substance to hurling’s suspicions that Croke Park sees it as the poorer relation to football. The decision to once again prioritise a secondary football competition, the Tailteann Cup semi-finals with a Sunday slot ahead of hurling’s blue riband in the form of All-Ireland SHC quarter-finals hardly shows respect to the latter sport. Privately, assurances were given that it wouldn’t happen again but this year’s Saturday evening throw-in times are the compromise.

In calling for hurling to breakaway from the GAA or pointing out a top level game shouldn’t go behind a paywall, Babs Keating and Dónal Óg Cusack will be damned as zealots. But so long as the GAA sabotage itself, their voices will be heard.

On Sunday week, the Kilkenny-Dublin Leinster SHC game will be show on GAA+ at the same time as RTÉ televises Tipperary v Waterford. For the GAA’s media partners, there was an obvious reason why their broadcasts of games on the same day didn’t overlap but there was a valid one for the GAA too. Why they now think developing their own broadcasting arm is an excuse to cannibalise is anyone’s guess.

In the end, Country House topped the charts with over 50,000 more unit sales, although their marketing had cleverly released a two-CD single version of their song, the second with a live version and a video. It didn’t matter that the B-sides on Roll With It were excellent, Rockin’ Chair a superior song to either of the band’s respective singles.

On Saturday, football will also win the battle. There will be about 8,000 more people in Clones than Ennis but the greater disparity will be in viewership. The Ulster SFC final will attract more eyeballs on RTÉ as opposed to the hurling clash being on a subscription streaming service.

Oasis were champions in the long run. Their album (What’s The Story) Morning Glory? spent 10 weeks at No 1 and has outsold Blur’s The Great Escape by over 20 million worldwide.

The Gallagher brothers always felt they were the better product. 

Hurling may think the same but the fundamental point from 1995 as it is now is in this phony war we really shouldn’t have to choose.