Hurling counties push for 2026 All-Ireland quarter-finals to return to Sunday

Tailteann Cup semi-finals could switch to Saturday.

FIXTURES: Hurling counties are pushing for the All-Ireland senior quarter-finals to return to a Sunday billing in 2026 in what would be the first time in six years. Picture: Ray McManus/Sportsfile

Hurling counties are pushing for the All-Ireland senior quarter-finals to return to a Sunday billing in 2026 in what would be the first time in six years.

Central Council will sign off on the master fixtures calendar on Saturday week and the Central Competitions Control Committee have intimated they would be agreeable to restoring the quarter-finals to a Sunday, which would be June 21 next year.

On a busy weekend, the Tailteann Cup semi-finals are also due to take place as well as the final round of the new Sam Maguire Cup qualifier format, which are effectively All-Ireland SFC preliminary quarter-finals. The losers from the Round 2A (Round 1 winners) will face off against the winners from Round 2B (Round 1 losers) with the first team being drawn out entitled to home advantage The All-Ireland SHC quarter-finals have not taken place on a Sunday since 2019 when Croke Park hosted a Kilkenny-Cork, Tipperary-Laois double-header and was attended by 44,135.

A primetime billing for hurling post-provincial finals next year will even more important if, as expected, the All-Ireland preliminary quarter-finals are removed.

The Hurling Development Committee will table that recommendation to Central Council next week. However, as the calendar is all but in place for 2026, the Joe McDonagh Cup is likely to conclude on June 6, as the curtain-raiser to the Leinster SHC final, meaning there will be just five inter-county hurling matches after that weekend.

In contrast, the draft master fixtures schedule states there will be 26 senior football games remaining after that weekend, 19 in the same Maguire Cup and seven in the Tailteann Cup.

After GAA president Jarlath Burns made a late attempt to switch the All-Ireland quarter-finals with the Tailteann Cup semis in 2024, it had been expected the hurling fixtures would go back to a Sunday staging this past season.

However, counties seemed happy enough that the hurling quarters would be played on Saturday evening instead of the afternoon as was the case last year.

Burns’s 11th hour move narrowly failed to receive the required 60% support at the emergency meeting of Central Council and so the Cork-Dublin and Clare-Wexford double bill went ahead in Thurles on Saturday afternoon with 1.15pm and 3.15pm throw-in times, while the Tailteann Cup semis, Laois v Antrim and Down v Sligo, remained on Sunday.

As part of the attempt to promote the secondary football competition, it was agreed in 2022 that the penultimate stage of the Taiilteann Cup would be televised in Croke Park on Sunday.

While those games have largely been competitive and the Tailteann Cup has largely been a success, the attendances pale in comparison to the hurling quarter-finals.

This year, a crowd of 36,546 took in Dublin’s famous win over Limerick in Croke Park as part of its scheduling alongside the Dublin-Cork preliminary SFC quarter-final, while 15,404 attended Tipperary’s victory over Galway in Salthill. The following day, the Tailteann Cup semi-finals at GAA HQ drew a 13,960 attendance.

In 2024, there were 10,348 in Croke Park for those second-tier football games, whereas the day before 30,509 were in FBD Semple Stadium for the hurling quarter-finals. In 2023 and ‘22, the hurling fixtures brought crowds of 34,180 and 34,640 to Limerick and Thurles respectively, while in the corresponding years the Tailteann matches were watched by approximately 17,500 and 16,166.

The GAA’s national games development chairman Micheál Martin believes All-Ireland senior hurling quarter-final day should be fixed for Croke Park and can become a festival of hurling. Speaking to this newspaper in June, Martin said the quarter-finals as they stand now have “lost a little in the calendar” and the Tailteann Cup “can stand on its own two feet”.

If the Tailteann Cup matches are switched to Saturday, it’s expected they will retain their televised status and continue to be played at Croke Park.