ON THE CENTENARY of the Gaelic football leagues, a quick history recap.
When the first league began, it did so in 1925. The final was eventually played on 19 September 1926. Laois, captained by the famous name of Dick Miller, beat Dublin 2-1 to 1-0, with Jack Brown scoring two goals.
Unthinkable now in an age when club players can commute from Australia to play for Dingle, but two Laois players, Paddy Lenihan and Bill Keeley, emigrated shortly before the final.
After a couple of years and a format change or two — it wouldn’t be Gaelic football if it wasn’t already in thrall to debates around ‘structures’ — the league trophy had its first sponsor and was duly named The Irish National Insurance Cup.
The entire notion of an Irish insurance company was born in the Frongoch internment camp, conceived of by Michael Collins among others, with the intention that when Ireland achieved independence, a national insurance company would be established and its profits would help to fund the government.
Bring it on a century and another insurance company, Allianz, is now the sponsor. Let’s just say they have had an interesting few months, which may drag on, and leave it at that.
So, what is the league?
It’s a question that the GAA have wrestled with forever. Perhaps uniquely among sports, it is a competition that plays second-fiddle in the affections of supporters, who are attracted by the big summer days when the straw hat brigade emerge and the buses start rolling around the country.
There’s nothing new in that observation. But the leagues mean different things, according to how far down you are on the food chain.
In Division 1 of football, it is a 100-metre dash, right up to the point that if you find yourself ahead after 80 metres, you pull the handbrake up sharpish.
In hurling, you wouldn’t want to get too carried away with any of it. There are so many difficult games for teams in the Leinster and Munster championship that the league has become an avant-garde environment. Good for experimentation. A change of shape or formation. Unearthing a young fella or two. But not for winning.
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And in the event you do, get the cup into a car boot sharpish.
Hurling league finals have become deeply unfashionable. For the 2023 edition, the game was between Limerick and Kilkenny, Limerick winning 2-20 to 0-15.
Limerick celebrate the winning of the 2023 hurling league. Evan Treacy / INPHO
Evan Treacy / INPHO / INPHO
Played in Páirc Uí Chaoimh, it was subject to something of a semi-boycott. The official attendance was only 17,243. It being Easter Sunday, there were just too many things on. Kilkenny had Westmeath 13 days later in Leinster; Limerick had a trip to Thurles to face a fired-up Waterford a fortnight later.
Scheduling is something the master fixture makers have – had – to get on top of.
A week before that 2023 hurling league final, Mayo beat Galway in the league football final. Not a side accustomed to national success, Mayo looked pleased with themselves to finally get over the line in a Croke Park final. The problem was that Roscommon had their feet up that day, dreaming about what they were going to do with the same Mayo team seven days later in the first round of the Connacht championship at Castlebar.
Roscommon won 2-8 to 0-10. Nobody was too fussed on the league trophy in Mayo that night, or any nights after. Dinner dance requests were thin on the ground.
A year later, Derry won the league following a penalty shoot-out victory over Dublin. Under Mickey Harte, they looked like The Team Most Likely To….
Three weeks later, Donegal ran out over the top of them as Derry self-imploded. They since burned through two managers and it’s only now, starting out again under Ciaran Meenagh in Division 2, that they are in the recovery position.
The top flight in football and hurling has become like Studio 54: an exclusive club, and very important to be seen there, but you have to act as cool as the other side of the pillow.
They started off beating Kerry away and Dublin at home. Then they walloped reigning All-Ireland champions Armagh. They had a blip against Galway and recovered by beating Derry.
Suddenly, their schedule was opening up. Win one of their last two games at home to Tyrone and away to Mayo and they were in a league final.
On 30 March. One week before they faced Derry in the opening round of Ulster.
Unquestionably, they pulled the handbrake up. They lost to Tyrone and even when they were in a position to beat Mayo, they fluffed a 67th minute penalty.
For all that, the leagues represent the most important competition that most counties play.
This year, Wexford hurlers will be coming to Ballycran to play Down, a community of hurling folk that are beyond remarkable for how their culture is maintained on the Ards peninsula. They will also be facing Clare in Ennis. Heady times for manager Ronan Sheehan and the long climb upwards.
That’s one standout line from the top two hurling divisions. There aren’t many more without the help of manufactured outrage or novelty.
In football, there is still a truth that if you operate in Divisions 3 and 4, losing your first two games means your season is sunk, even before Valentine’s Day.
What does it mean to the footballers of Down or Laois or Westmeath to find themselves stuck in Division 3? Likewise, any Division 4 county needs to get themselves out of that league as soon as possible.
We’ve come this far and we realise the whole endeavour sounds a bit grim.
It’s really not.
There is a giddy optimism at the outset of any season that any sports fan gets. The possibilities are endless and that hope remains with you right up to the point when it is crushed.
And at that point, you wipe the sorrows of the league away. Sure what of it anyway? Don’t we know we were only throwing shapes at the thing and that championship is the only show in town?
It’s another Irish solution to a sporting problem. But we take it every single time.
There will be controversies and talking points. The form of David Clifford will forever be a fascination no matter if it’s a snowy February night or a baking hot day in Croke Park.
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How far have Armagh gone back? Will Limerick miss Seamus Flanagan? How many of the 136 players trialled can come through and have a role to play with the Dublin footballers? Can Ben O’Connor hit the ground running with Cork?
Absent friends: Seamus Flanagan. James Crombie / INPHO
James Crombie / INPHO / INPHO
There will be days on which your county wins and the league feels utterly critical to everything. There will be days they lose and it barely registers.
There will be a million talking points. It will start this weekend when a good number of county managers will be asked if their players have discussed any form of protest over the Allianz sponsorship.
And you’d wonder, looking at it in a phlegmatic way, how Allianz could be bothered all the same. Thirty years of sponsorship and the GAA have always known that giving the league the big sell provokes nothing but snorts of laughter.
A competition that is sort-of-a-competition. A holding pattern before the championship. Something for the papers, websites and podcasts to get excited about. For a time.
And then it’s over, blown out the back yard. A handy bit of context for championship previews, but all the same, to be taken lightly.
One hundred years in operation and nobody can quite figure it out. But it works. Sort of.
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One hundred years on, we are still figuring out what purpose the GAA leagues serve
ON THE CENTENARY of the Gaelic football leagues, a quick history recap.
When the first league began, it did so in 1925. The final was eventually played on 19 September 1926. Laois, captained by the famous name of Dick Miller, beat Dublin 2-1 to 1-0, with Jack Brown scoring two goals.
Unthinkable now in an age when club players can commute from Australia to play for Dingle, but two Laois players, Paddy Lenihan and Bill Keeley, emigrated shortly before the final.
After a couple of years and a format change or two — it wouldn’t be Gaelic football if it wasn’t already in thrall to debates around ‘structures’ — the league trophy had its first sponsor and was duly named The Irish National Insurance Cup.
The entire notion of an Irish insurance company was born in the Frongoch internment camp, conceived of by Michael Collins among others, with the intention that when Ireland achieved independence, a national insurance company would be established and its profits would help to fund the government.
Bring it on a century and another insurance company, Allianz, is now the sponsor. Let’s just say they have had an interesting few months, which may drag on, and leave it at that.
So, what is the league?
It’s a question that the GAA have wrestled with forever. Perhaps uniquely among sports, it is a competition that plays second-fiddle in the affections of supporters, who are attracted by the big summer days when the straw hat brigade emerge and the buses start rolling around the country.
There’s nothing new in that observation. But the leagues mean different things, according to how far down you are on the food chain.
In Division 1 of football, it is a 100-metre dash, right up to the point that if you find yourself ahead after 80 metres, you pull the handbrake up sharpish.
In hurling, you wouldn’t want to get too carried away with any of it. There are so many difficult games for teams in the Leinster and Munster championship that the league has become an avant-garde environment. Good for experimentation. A change of shape or formation. Unearthing a young fella or two. But not for winning.
And in the event you do, get the cup into a car boot sharpish.
Hurling league finals have become deeply unfashionable. For the 2023 edition, the game was between Limerick and Kilkenny, Limerick winning 2-20 to 0-15.
Played in Páirc Uí Chaoimh, it was subject to something of a semi-boycott. The official attendance was only 17,243. It being Easter Sunday, there were just too many things on. Kilkenny had Westmeath 13 days later in Leinster; Limerick had a trip to Thurles to face a fired-up Waterford a fortnight later.
Scheduling is something the master fixture makers have – had – to get on top of.
A week before that 2023 hurling league final, Mayo beat Galway in the league football final. Not a side accustomed to national success, Mayo looked pleased with themselves to finally get over the line in a Croke Park final. The problem was that Roscommon had their feet up that day, dreaming about what they were going to do with the same Mayo team seven days later in the first round of the Connacht championship at Castlebar.
A year later, Derry won the league following a penalty shoot-out victory over Dublin. Under Mickey Harte, they looked like The Team Most Likely To….
Three weeks later, Donegal ran out over the top of them as Derry self-imploded. They since burned through two managers and it’s only now, starting out again under Ciaran Meenagh in Division 2, that they are in the recovery position.
The top flight in football and hurling has become like Studio 54: an exclusive club, and very important to be seen there, but you have to act as cool as the other side of the pillow.
For further reading, look at Donegal last year.
They started off beating Kerry away and Dublin at home. Then they walloped reigning All-Ireland champions Armagh. They had a blip against Galway and recovered by beating Derry.
Suddenly, their schedule was opening up. Win one of their last two games at home to Tyrone and away to Mayo and they were in a league final.
On 30 March. One week before they faced Derry in the opening round of Ulster.
Unquestionably, they pulled the handbrake up. They lost to Tyrone and even when they were in a position to beat Mayo, they fluffed a 67th minute penalty.
For all that, the leagues represent the most important competition that most counties play.
This year, Wexford hurlers will be coming to Ballycran to play Down, a community of hurling folk that are beyond remarkable for how their culture is maintained on the Ards peninsula. They will also be facing Clare in Ennis. Heady times for manager Ronan Sheehan and the long climb upwards.
That’s one standout line from the top two hurling divisions. There aren’t many more without the help of manufactured outrage or novelty.
In football, there is still a truth that if you operate in Divisions 3 and 4, losing your first two games means your season is sunk, even before Valentine’s Day.
What does it mean to the footballers of Down or Laois or Westmeath to find themselves stuck in Division 3? Likewise, any Division 4 county needs to get themselves out of that league as soon as possible.
We’ve come this far and we realise the whole endeavour sounds a bit grim.
It’s really not.
There is a giddy optimism at the outset of any season that any sports fan gets. The possibilities are endless and that hope remains with you right up to the point when it is crushed.
And at that point, you wipe the sorrows of the league away. Sure what of it anyway? Don’t we know we were only throwing shapes at the thing and that championship is the only show in town?
It’s another Irish solution to a sporting problem. But we take it every single time.
There will be controversies and talking points. The form of David Clifford will forever be a fascination no matter if it’s a snowy February night or a baking hot day in Croke Park.
How far have Armagh gone back? Will Limerick miss Seamus Flanagan? How many of the 136 players trialled can come through and have a role to play with the Dublin footballers? Can Ben O’Connor hit the ground running with Cork?
There will be days on which your county wins and the league feels utterly critical to everything. There will be days they lose and it barely registers.
There will be a million talking points. It will start this weekend when a good number of county managers will be asked if their players have discussed any form of protest over the Allianz sponsorship.
And you’d wonder, looking at it in a phlegmatic way, how Allianz could be bothered all the same. Thirty years of sponsorship and the GAA have always known that giving the league the big sell provokes nothing but snorts of laughter.
A competition that is sort-of-a-competition. A holding pattern before the championship. Something for the papers, websites and podcasts to get excited about. For a time.
And then it’s over, blown out the back yard. A handy bit of context for championship previews, but all the same, to be taken lightly.
One hundred years in operation and nobody can quite figure it out. But it works. Sort of.
Check out the latest episode of The 42′s GAA Weekly podcast here
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