If Maya Angelou was a GAA woman – and we don’t know for sure that she wasn’t – one of her most famous truisms would need a slight amendment. “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time” might be sound advice out there in the real world, but when it comes to predicting GAA games “when someone shows you who they are, expect them to behave completely differently the next day” might be a little closer to the truth.
For a constituency of people raised for over 100 years on the sacred idea that championship means straight knock-out, the GAA fan is now increasingly obsessed with the idea that a setback is only the set-up for a comeback.
Did Kilkenny really give us a devastating response to some recent poor performances on Saturday evening against Wexford in Nowlan Park, or did they just pour it on against a Wexford team that might now be the second-worst team in Leinster?
Donegal were barely out of the Ulster championship before people started saying how dangerous a proposition this defeat would make them for the rest of the year, which is a fairly optimistic outlook for a crowd that had been ruthlessly, relentlessly, repeatedly opened up by a Division 3 team. Getting badly beaten is ... bad, surely?
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It looks as if people in Mayo are too downbeat even to ask for much of a response from their team after their defenestration at the hands of the Rossies on Sunday. Maybe now isn’t the time to be asking them to show a bit of fight. Wallowing for a week is a far more attractive proposition, and they have weeks to play with now.
It is no longer a straight knock-out championship, and we now look at teams and almost expect their performance levels to vacillate wildly from game to game. If they lose badly, it’s almost assumed that a thunderous response will be incoming the next day out, instead of doing what people do in regular sport and predicting a team’s future display based on their recent performances, which sounds grand and all, but which is surely only a mug’s game.
Over the last number of years I have gained a certain notoriety among Second Captains podcast listeners for one particular branch of niche sports prediction. I have, it is no exaggeration to say, managed to achieve some kind of psychic mind-meld with the Scottish rugby team in the Six Nations. I know them better than I know myself, and 2026 was a banner year for us both.
Lose to Italy first up? No problem, they’ll beat England next. Play terribly against a historically bad Wales team? France at home will be a piece of cake. Suddenly have to deal with the expectation and pressure of a Triple Crown decider against Ireland in Lansdowne Road? I said on the Thursday before that game Ireland would beat them “by a point a man”, and only a Tommy O’Brien try in the last minute robbed me of that 15-point victory. Knowing nothing whatsoever about rugby allows me to study pure unfiltered vibes, and it works a treat.
All but the very best GAA teams could stand accused of Scotland-ism. Who needs consistency when you can just flit from game to game, emoting wildly in opposite directions from one end of a week to the next. We now have a pair of Leinster football semi-finals this weekend that defy any rational analysis.
Westmeath are by all accounts too good for Division 3, but nevertheless that is where they are. They will be joined there next year by Kildare, who started their Division 2 campaign this year with whispers of promotion, got three points from their first two games, and followed that up with five straight defeats. Before they meet in the third tier, they have to play each other in a Leinster semi-final that is the very definition of TJ Ryan’s “deaf dog” – hard to call.
Westmeath have this uncanny knack of playing up, or down, to the quality of the opposition they face on any given day. In 2024 they were in an All-Ireland round-robin group with both of that year’s eventual finalists, and the reigning National League winners, and gave all three of them a horrific fright. They had done the exact same to Galway and Armagh the year before, and drew a third game with Tyrone they could easily have won.
That suggests a team that should be mid-table Division 2, pushing for promotion. They were exceptional against last year’s All-Ireland semi-finalists Meath in their provincial quarter-final this month, but they too often throw in terrible performances when they can least afford them. The question before Sunday is who do you mistrust the least.
And trust is the vital thing in Saturday’s semi-final as well. Dublin could do anything this weekend. If they have Con O’Callaghan, there’s every chance they’ll be decent. If they don’t have him, then who knows.
Louth are a far steadier proposition, consistency in a provincial championship gone mad. Their levels don’t really go up or down, and it’s been a solid graph of progression for four years now. There’s a feeling around them that you can trust.
People will still be awaiting that big Dublin response, no matter how ordinary they’ve been all year. Form would suggest a Louth-Westmeath provincial final. But honestly, who the hell knows?
