Amazing decade in history of GAA

A couple of weeks ago, the GAA's principal outbreak of the madness, the Millennium football team, was mulled over. One of its chief drawbacks was the lack of continuity in its terms of reference. No one could remember players from the first half of the GAA's history and even those who occupied the same continuum of recall were hard to compare satisfactorily.

In the meantime a rumble of public debate has begun in relation to a more manageable concept, team and teams of the decade. With only one place left to fill in this year's All-Ireland finals line-up, the last year of the 1990s has almost told its tale.

What is remarkable about next month's pairings is the extent to which the power-base in hurling and football has swung back to established counties. Armagh represent the last shot at keeping an air of novelty about this year after a decade of virtual revolution in both codes.

Should Meath win, three of the counties which featured in the first All-Irelands of the decade will be present at the last. The odd one out, Kilkenny qualified for the three hurling finals, 1991-93, and hardly qualify as a new phenomenon. And the prospects of Cork bookending the decade with doubles has already been widely canvassed.

Yet the 1990s have been an extraordinary decade in the history of Gaelic games. Although hurling has received most attention in the second half of the decade, football broke a lot of ground in the earlier years. Statistics indicate the extent to which this happened.

No previous decade has featured: eight different All-Ireland winners (and the figure could be nine if Armagh win the title) - five is the nearest previous decades have come; five different winners in successive years. Before 1992, Dublin had never lost to an Ulster county. In the years that followed they hardly beat one.

After a gap of two decades, there was once again an All-Ireland won by every province and it was the first time since the 1890s that two new winners - Donegal and Derry - had arrived in successive years and also the first time in 100 years that Kerry have reached only one All-Ireland in a decade.

The level of competition at the All-Ireland semi-final stages has been remarkable with the old two-tier caste system being dispensed with as the champions of Ulster and Connacht have disrupted the laid-back gradualism which used to make approaching these matches so much less complicated for Munster and Leinster teams.

Inevitably, speculation has begun as to the teams of the decade in both games. Maybe it has been more fierce in relation to the hurling because the issue has been clouded by ambiguity on the roll of honour. Such ephemeral distinctions as Team of the Decade don't always obey rational dictates.

There has been no real disputing the fact that Clare have earned the distinction. Kilkenny may end up winning more All-Irelands, they and Offaly already have as many; Offaly may have been the most gifted and, on their day, exquisite side to watch; Wexford may have brought bigger crowds. But Clare did more to stamp their personality on the decade.

They have reached the semi-finals four times in five years and generated a pile of publicity - some good, some not so good - and progressed from much-loved underdogs to less-loved top-dogs in the manner most champions do.

Although not everyone in the county agreed with the stridency and paranoia which some of the teams at times developed - in the words of one player believing that after 1995, people wanted them `to f*** off back to Doolin and keep drinking pints' - the Clare public identified with their team more than was the case in any other county.

It's not Offaly's fault that the county is relatively small and doesn't command the same crowds or Kilkenny's fault that along with other traditional counties, their presence on the national stage doesn't create the same sense of novelty. But posterity doesn't take account of such things.

What do we remember - or associate with - hurling in the 1950s? Wexford. Two of the county's players - Nick O'Donnell and Nicky Rackard - featured on the Team of the Century and they generated record crowds at All-Irelands. Yet the team won only two: 1955 and '56. Cork won three in a row in the years before that and Tipperary also ended the decade with three All-Irelands.

So it is with Clare. They brought the game to a higher plane in the public eye and will be remembered for a host of epic afternoons in Munster and Croke Park.

In football the question is far harder. Although there is for the moment a clear leader on the roll of honour, unanimous opinions will be harder to find. Cork in 1990 were completing the county's first back-to-back football All-Irelands. Galway won Connacht's first in 32 years. Dublin overcame devastating setbacks before eventually winning.

Down is the only county with two titles to its name. It is possible for them to be joined on this mark by either Meath or Cork but their claims are sound regardless of this. Just as it's hard to think back to the beginning of 1994 when no one could see anyone apart from Cork, Tipperary, Kilkenny or Galway winning the All-Ireland, it's equally difficult to remember what the football world was like at the beginning of the 1991 championship.

There had been a Leinster-Munster duopoly for 23 years. Kerry and Dublin looked to have been seamlessly replaced by Cork and Meath and no great change was on the horizon apart from maybe the rise of Dublin - which was to be delayed after the four-match series against Meath that year.

For Down to break through that inhibiting environment and make off with an All-Ireland was an astonishing achievement. Only once since 1968 when Down themselves had won the All-Ireland, had a Connacht or Ulster team beaten a Leinster or Munster side even in a semi-final.

Not alone did their breakthrough change the face of football for other teams in Ulster but Down did it with style. Their attack was the best of the 1990s with four players of genuine class and application whereas in the middle whether at centrefield or centre back, Barry Breen would have to be on any All Star team of the decade.

Maybe it got a bit ropier at the back but both defences, in 1991 and '94, kept the opposition scores within the range of their searing attack and cerebral play-makers.

They blazed the trail in 1991 with the assurance that their extraordinary track record - of never having lost to Kerry or in an All-Ireland final - equipped them. They're what I'll always associate with an historic decade.

E-mail: smoran@irish-times.ie