Impact of draws fading into the mists of autumn

ON GAELIC GAMES:The reason most of the air has hissed out of the championship draws is the increasing influence of the qualifier system

TOMORROW THE draws for next year’s championships take place in Croke Park. It should be slightly jolting with the All-Irelands just concluded a couple of weeks but instead it’s as much part of autumn as leaves and turf smoke. Its impact has, however, faded in recent years. What used to be a road map for the following summer – precisely and logically laid out to lead in a preordained direction – has become as relevant as the cartography of a bypassed town.

In autumns past, often on the bank holiday weekend, grumpy reporters might find themselves in the concrete bunker of an RTÉ hospitality room, as the studio in which the draw was being made was too small to accommodate both media and the vast assembly of officialdom considered necessary to execute the business at hand, plus the handful of celebrity players whose guarded reaction to matches over half a year away would be dutifully sought.

But in its own way it made sense. Until 10 years ago, there would have been National League matches taking place in October so the season was in a sense under way. Waiting at the end of what surely must have been the most protracted competitions in organised sport were the championship fixtures – the real target dates.

Being drawn on a provincial basis, the fixtures generated a limited range of issues. The seismic collision of Dublin and Meath in the first year of Leinster’s open draw in 1991 meant that everyone for years afterwards kept an eye out to check were the counties on the same side of the draw or would the provincial final have a bumper attendance.

It was much the same in Munster and Connacht. When was the last final without both Cork and Kerry (it used to be 1965)? Were Galway and Mayo on different sides of the draw and who would be the likeliest beneficiaries on the other side?

Ulster was Ulster, insisting until nine years ago on biennial draws that locked counties into two years of pre-destination, generally prompting sighs of not-entirely rapt anticipation – Derry and Tyrone? Again?

Anyway, these were important additions to the discourse of the Gael. No interviews or public utterances would be complete without a reference to Fermanagh - Roscommon - Clare - Louth or whoever “waiting for us at the end of the May”. And not surprisingly. Particularly in Ulster where it appeared no team could regard itself as safe to sneak a peek at the teams in the adjacent grid and speculate on potential semi-final opponents.

Two items were top of the agenda in the North: who would be most credibly equipped to commit the regicide that always seemed to befall the champions within Ulster before Tyrone and Armagh turned the whole thing into a private function and what teams were paired in the preliminary round, an unerring indicator of failure – for both counties.

There was a view that the draws should be dusted off and turned into a jamboree occasion, maybe located down in the All-Ireland winning counties.

This never quite took off and the most exotic draw remains the 2003 version, which took place in Perth’s Sheraton Hotel – not in some hubristic expression of zeitgeist excess but because a critical mass of journalists, officials and players were in town for the International Rules series.

Damien Fitzhenry attended simply because he had been backpacking in the desert or something and I remember wondering months later if he could have had any inkling that the season sketched out that evening in Western Australia would bring him and Wexford victory over Kilkenny and what is still their most recent Leinster title.

The reason most of the air has hissed out of the event and even the revelations it unveils is of course the increasing impact of the qualifier system.

In a year when all four of the All-Ireland semi-finalists came through on the outside track and none of the eight provincial finalists won a further match in the championship it is easy to see how tomorrow’s draw may be quite forgotten by the beginning of August.

After all, the 2010 provincial championships were rendered irrelevant to the fates of Cork, Down, Dublin and Kildare.

Had Dublin been told that they would play abysmally in Leinster and lose to Meath for the first time in nine years; had Kildare been granted a premonition of how Louth would tear them apart; had Cork foreseen even the tattered veil of their provincial supremacy over Kerry would disappear or Down that second-half disintegration against Tyrone – they would have feared the worst for the season but that’s not how it plays out any more.

No team sets out to lose a match but it can’t have escaped the world’s attention that the last four in this year’s championship all attested to the benefits of having a weekly programme of knock-out matches in the qualifiers whereas Kerry and Tyrone were left in the quarter-finals squealing about the injustice of it all for provincial winners.

It used to be specifically a football phenomenon but this year saw for the first time a hurling team, Tipperary, sustain a bad defeat early in the championship (the only county in either code to have been beaten in May and recover to win the All-Ireland) and slowly re-gather momentum before finishing irresistibly.

Increasingly the only provincial titles certain to get an assay stamp are Kilkenny’s. They have been unmatched in the province and for most of the decade in the country at large – albeit in the context of there being no competitive depth in Leinster. In football for instance Cork and Kerry have accumulated five All-Irelands in the past 10 years but on only two occasions as Munster champions.

Yet there is no serious clamour to dispense with the provincial championships and this season for all that their status was undermined by events, there could be no underestimating Roscommon’s joy in winning Connacht or the varying degrees of pain for Limerick, Monaghan and Louth in losing their provincial finals.

This provision of an interim goal for counties, the administrative convenience of leaving the early summer to the provincial councils and the integrity of ancient local rivalries are all reasons why the status quo survives. Tomorrow will provide counties with a fixed spot on the horizon but whereas in the past no one could be quite sure how it would all end, ambitious counties can no longer be certain when it will – in earnest – all begin.