A NEW SEASON means a new culture war or two around the GAA. This time last year you were nobody unless you had a firm position on the way hurling was being refereed, with particular regard for what or was not a legitimate hand pass.
Then came the split season debate. That’s almost categorised now with religion and politics as a subject you might not want to raise in polite society.
Today it’s the league. Is it important? Is it not important?
Your opinion will be determined greatly by your perspective.
If you’re a player, then your answer will say a lot about where you are in your career. Does TJ Reid or Gearóid Hegarty need a strong winter and early spring campaign to assert their place in the pecking order? Not at all. Yet most players do.
And even for the most nailed-on of starters in a winning, settled team, the league is important because if it’s not then everything we know about human nature is wrong.
Sports people are competitive – often ridiculously so if they reach the level of inter-county GAA. Once a sliotar is thrown in and a few bodies collide and a contest settles into a score-for-score rhythm then any idea that this is all only of value as a precursor to something that’s going to happen months away is gone.
That’s one of the many beautiful things about sport: it puts you right in the moment.
We may have become sophisticated at planning and training towards games more than half a year away. Yet you can still only live in the here and now. In the here and now is a game we all want to win.
Lads my age and far older will become madly competitive during a five-a-side game on the astroturf. I once shared a house with four other fellas, and the arguments raged and grudges lingered over games of Fifa on the PlayStation.
So put a county jersey on someone’s back, throw into the mix rivalries between teams built up over years and generations, 20,000 supporters baying from the packed stands and, well, if this is unimportant then it’s the most important unimportant thing I know about.
Imagine how Shane Kingston felt when he ran through in the final seconds of 10 minutes of stoppage time last Saturday night. He will have been locked into that play, giving it everything of his physical and mental focus. To see his shot fly over from an acute angle and help Cork to a one-point win he’ll have been absolutely buzzing. So will all of the Cork team.
But here’s the rub: they’ll be aware this win can fade from memory as fast as last year’s in the league over the same opponents at the Gaelic Grounds if it’s not backed up later in the year.
And they’ll also know that Limerick are back in the country for three weeks following their team holiday. They’ll know the All-Ireland champions are training intensively through the league, especially these early stages, and only a fool would think that last Saturday was anything close to the best that they have to offer.
Yet they didn’t go eight points up and then resolve to lose. Being the competitors they are, Limerick will have left the field in an unfulfilled, annoyed frame of mind. Though they will have progressed past those emotions swiftly.
You don’t have to delve further into history than Limerick of 2022 to see that poor results in the league can quickly become redundant.
There are many other, if less stark, examples of the competition serving its primary purpose as a building project rather than a standalone event.
My first full league campaign with Cork came in 2013. Dónal Óg Cusack was injured in the league semi-final the previous season, meaning I stepped in.
So going into the 2013 league I knew, realistically, that barring injury or a collapse in form, I’d be starting for Cork come championship time. Was I holding anything back during that league campaign? Far from it. I was determined to prove my worth at the highest level of our sport; and this was a fantastic opportunity to do so.
We finished up in a relegation decider against Clare in Limerick, which we lost. That bare stat alone might tell you the campaign was a huge disappointment, but it was not viewed as such internally. We’d performed well. Jimmy Barry Murphy, our manager, had blooded a new team.
We had a strong sense we were progressing, as championship results which led to us qualifying for an All-Ireland final we only lost after a replay confirmed. And of course our opponents in that final were the same Clare team we’d faced in the relegation play-off.
But that’s far from an indictment of the league. We lost the final in 2015 when I was captain. I would have loved to win that medal. But ultimately you move on in a way that wasn’t so straightforward after the All-Ireland defeat of 2013.
I’ve rarely if ever seen a player floored by a result, face-in-hands-and-can’t-get-off-the-ground upset, at having given their everything only to fall short in a league game, not even a final.
We’ll know the league has got the respect it fully deserves the day when there is emotional jeopardy involved.
How does that happen? We’d love to give you a neat solution that can at once address the GAA’s fixture congestion and our culturally embedded views toward the league. But I’m afraid there isn’t one I know of.
Progress can and likely will come as a result of good people getting into a room time after time and inching us towards a more satisfactory system – one where more of our condensed inter-county season is taken up with games of appropriate billing.
There are several things which would help. If the season is now January to July then it makes sense to start the league season by mid January, with the likes of the Walsh Cup and Munster Hurling Leagues done away with.
At the minute the league is being squeezed from every direction: the preseason tournaments before it, the provincial championships starting two weeks after the league final, and then the Fitzgibbon Cup during the early stages.
Your picture of the Fitzgibbon too depends greatly on your vantage point. One of my most cherished medals is the Fitzgibbon we won in 2009 with UCC, and this has got as much as anything to do with the great friends made during that wonderful time as part of the late Paul O’Connor’s team.
By the time I was well clear of university I’d say to my Cork manager Kieran Kingston, “I can’t wait until the Fitzgibbon is over with and we have everyone together.”
By last season, involved with UL, I was on the phone to Kieran to see how he’d be fixed to let us have Sean Twomey. Kieran would be laughing down the phone. “I remember the days when you thought the Fitzgibbon wasn’t important at all!”
Still involved with UL, I think there’s very much a place for the Fitzgibbon if the league gets a little more space to breathe at the start and end of its run.
Given a choice of a Fitzgibbon or league medal, many players might choose the former, which doesn’t quite stack up.
The Fitzgibbon is a special competition given its history and the time it arrives in the lives of players, when they are forming friendships which will endure long beyond their college days.
But inter-county is the highest level of hurling, and a competition which rewards consistent performance at the pinnacle of the game ought to be close to, if not quite the equal of, championship.
Winning a league in the top, or for that matter any, division must be incentivised as much as possible. Without seeking to solve every problem with money, is it possible that winning panels are treated to a holiday at the end of the season? Or is there some other incentive greater than a medal in a competition which will be usurped almost as soon as the cup is handed out?
It shouldn’t be such a distant dream.
In the meantime, do what you always do: enjoy whatever game you’re watching today. And when you feel that thing we like to call excitement, go with it. I can see very little point in trying to temper your buzz by second guessing a future that is guaranteed to nobody.
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