The harmless futility of future gazing.
Towards the end of his press conference after the National Hurling League final last April, Liam Cahill was asked if Tipperary had held something back. His team had just lost by 10 points to Cork, though the wind chill in the outcome had more bite than that. Tipp were due back in Páirc Uí Chaoimh later in the month for round two of the Munster championship, so it was natural to assume some degree of chicanery.
“We’ll have to come back here with something different in three weeks’ time,” Cahill said.
As it turned out, they lost again, this time by 15 points. Darragh McCarthy was sent off in the opening minute, mutilating the game as a spectacle. The interesting undeclared, unrevealed element, though, was that Tipp had planned to play a sweeper that day. Cahill didn’t say so at the time, or at any time since, but that was the card they intended to play from the bottom of the deck. McCarthy’s sending off stayed their hand.
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What it meant, crucially, was that the curve ball of playing an extra defender was still available when they met Cork again in the All-Ireland final three months later. Whatever suspicions Cork may have had about Tipp’s plans for Croke Park, they didn’t have the benefit of running a fire drill against a Tipp sweeper in April. The long-term reverberations of McCarthy’s sending off were unimaginable at the time.
And all the time we waste thinking about what’s going to happen next.
“Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards,” said the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, long before the round-robin system was introduced.
The hurling year begins again on Saturday, not with trumpet blasts but to the trill sound of a kazoo. Still, everybody is stuck in their own operas. From year to year, the only constant is the great entanglement of viciously competing needs. In their own minds, everybody is up against a bottom line.
Tipp must try to win back-to-back All-Irelands for the first time since the 1960s, a staggering statistical anomaly in their proud record that has confounded Tipp’s last seven All-Ireland winners.
Cork are still locked in a mud wrestle with the longest hiatus between titles in their history, which stretches out to 21 years now. Kilkenny entered that swamp last year and are moving further away from dry land; 11 years without a title sets a new bar for their worst run. There has never been a full decade in the history of the game when Cork and Kilkenny both failed to win an All-Ireland.
Wexford are now 30 years without an All-Ireland, which is longer than the gap they closed in 1996. Never again, they said. Limerick are managing the decline of the greatest team in their history. Clare must deal with generational change and their bamboozling failure to win a Munster title in 28 years. That bothers them.
Dublin must do better. They’re trying. It’s hard to remember a Leinster championship that was so ripe for picking. Brilliance not necessary.
Waterford are desperate to escape the vortex of the Munster round robin for the first time since this format was introduced. Galway have gone seven years without contesting an All-Ireland, their longest continuous absence from the final since the end of the last century. They weren’t good last year. Or the year before that.
And on it goes, everyone shaking their fists at the sky about something.
So, you still want to look ahead?
Hurling’s eco-system at elite level has always been fragile but last season its vulnerability was exposed more than it had been for a while. When the provincial round-robin systems were introduced in 2018, the championship was given a shot of adrenaline that survived the pandemic and came out the other side.
The vitality of that format, though, depends on peer-to-peer competition between at least four teams in each province. Historically, this had been beyond hurling’s means. It was a glorious freak that a period of unusual competitive depth should coincide with the most dynamic format the championship had ever known.
But without a certain level of competition, this format has a destructive nature. Last year’s Leinster championship was a crock. The average margin of victory was 10 points. Galway, Wexford, Offaly and Antrim all suffered at least one double-digit defeat. The mood was further depressed by a glut of poorly attended Saturday fixtures that emphasised the Leinster championship’s status as a sideshow.
But the fans that stayed at home, what did they miss? In different ways in recent years, Galway, Dublin and Wexford have been dysfunctional. Kilkenny have won six Leinster titles in a row with a team that has failed to win an All-Ireland and yet nobody has been able to take them out.
Just like with every other format change since the back door was introduced in 1997, it has always been folly to believe that the format will rescue the championship. All the signs are that Wexford will be weaker this year than they were last year. Galway, for their part, didn’t get the bounce everyone expected from Micheál Donoghue’s return. He is under pressure to deliver something substantial without any further delay.
Dublin are not as good as they looked against Limerick or as bad as they looked against Cork, but how good are they? Should they be better too? Of course.
The Munster championship didn’t deliver a diet of high-class games last season, but in that regard we had been spoiled for years. What people want, though, is the sense that all three outcomes are on the table in every game. That was still true in Munster last year.
But it is not enough for one province to flourish as a competitive entity. Leinster is in its biggest state of crisis since the early years of the century, before Galway joined in. That concerns about half of hurling’s first world.
And the league? It is best not to think about it too much.
