In Ballybofey a fortnight ago, the queue for grub in the Villa Rose was as dense as the burgers on the menu. And just as full of flavour. The street outside was lined with young lads with Donegal hair, leaning against the wall of the hotel and knocking back cider in the April sun. Championship was general all over Main Street.
(Don’t be feigning mystification as to what constitutes Donegal hair, by the way. You know it well. Long enough for a bit of bounce in the curls but not so long as to need tying up. Hinting, always, at a wildness within. Finnbarr Roarty, the teenage corner-back who made his championship debut against Derry, has a classic head of Donegal hair. One look at it and you can smell the rally fumes.)
Everybody knew Donegal would win. Nobody came to MacCumhaill Park thinking there was a Derry challenge in the offing. And still the crowd tipped the scales at 15,023. In last year’s football championship, that would have been the second biggest attendance at a stand-alone game outside the provincial finals, All-Ireland semi-finals and final. It will be right up there when the counting stops this time around too.
In Clones this weekend, the Ulster Council are expecting somewhere a little shy of that number for Monaghan v Donegal. Probably something broadly similar the following weekend in the Athletic Grounds for Armagh v Tyrone. The final has sold out for the past three years in a row and there’s no reason to think it won’t again.
All this for the battered old Ulster Championship, a competition that by most measurements is worth less now than has ever been the case in its history. Winning it doesn’t get you into an All-Ireland semi-final or even a quarter-final any more. All it buys you is a Sam Maguire group avoiding the other provincial champions. Which sounds like a big prize until you remember how hard it is to get knocked out of the group stage anyway.
And yet, it’s still a thing that everyone feels compelled to scratch and claw for. The last three finals have gone to extra-time. The last two needed penalties. Even that wasn’t enough in 2024, when Donegal and Armagh went to sudden death in the shoot-out before they could be separated. Down the country, expending that kind of effort to win a provincial title would nearly be regarded as unseemly.
So why does the Ulster Championship still work? After all, it would be so much easier for everyone if it didn’t. The whole All-Ireland template could be torn up, the provincials could be quietly euthanised, every county would have to clear the same amount off their plate to win the overall competition. The championship could be neat and tidy and easily explained.
But it does work. You can see that as a problem or you can see it as a godsend but what you can’t do is ignore the truth of it. Four different counties have won the last five titles. The past 10 deciders have featured nine different combinations of finalists. Eight of the nine teams have been to an Ulster final since 2017. The competition is ferocious, in every sense.
At its heart, it works because the rivalries have never died on the vine like they have elsewhere. Cork’s years of wan capitulation to Kerry would never have been allowed to happen in Ulster. There’d be plenty in the northern province who’d have sympathy with how the Dublin beast was fed by Croke Park to go chomping on the Leinster Championship but there’s limits to that too. At a certain point, you have to get thick about this stuff and find a bit of defiance.
Ulster works because of some of the oldest, fiercest and frankly most malign human impulses. Jealousy is a big one, for a start. Jim McGuinness has been stomping around the place declaring that the Ulster Championship is the be all and end all – you think the other counties are going to shrug and let him have it? No chance. They’ll try to win it even if it’s just to annoy him.
Insecurity plays its part, insularity too. It’s a big old world out there but there’s still nothing sweeter than coveting thy neighbour’s ox, slaying it in front of the watching hordes, and serving it up for dinner. The fact that Ulster teams are emptying themselves in the pursuit of said ox while Dublin and Kerry are yawning their way through the early summer is always forgotten in the moment.
And people love it. They give themselves to it freely and fully. A couple of years back, I arrived into Clones about two hours before the Armagh v Derry final and already the place was baloobas. Half-cut, sunburned, chip-greased and teeming with life.
A garda came by me with a young buck from Armagh in a headlock and bounced him into the back of a paddywagon. His mates made no attempt to save him and instead tramped on up the hill to the game in stitches laughing. “Sure the stupid [bleep!] spat in the cop’s face ...”
The tension during the match that day was ungodly. Same again last year. The new rules have loosened up the game so maybe when the heavier hitters meet this time around, it won’t be a case of trying to outlast each other and hoping to make the fewest mistakes. Donegal v Derry wasn’t encouraging on that front. Maybe this weekend will be different.
But whatever the aesthetics, the Ulster Championship is still going strong. Still, despite everything, the best argument the provincial championships have in their favour. Awkward, parochial and deeply, soulfully essential.
Everything you’d want from a sporting competition, in other words.
