Ireland must rise to daunting challenge

On Gaelic Games: Sometimes we forget the role of the challenge: not the challenge match as enshrined in GAA traditions, that non-competitive encounter known to other sports as the "friendly", but the dictionary-defined call to prove oneself, especially in a contest.

At the height of summer there is little focus on that central element of challenge. All the play is about winning trophies and adjusting/maintaining the balance of power within provinces and between leading teams.

It's obvious what's at stake.

As we head deeper into autumn the concept of challenge becomes more important. Watching last Saturday's Railway Cup semi-final among the thousand or so who turned up under the lights of Breffni Park, it was impossible not to be struck by how committed the match became - within the obvious constraints of fitness and conditioning at this time of the year.

On paper, Ulster should have won: their team looked stronger and had quality all around the field. But for the second year running they lost out to a Leinster side that played with just a degree more urgency.

Afterwards, winning manager Val Andrews spoke about how he had rushed to the Ireland International Rules training camp that morning to plead with his national counterpart Seán Boylan to cut him some slack on the availability of players.

He was rewarded by the release of most people's man of the match, Meath forward Joe Sheridan, whose bulk and ball-winning contributed so much to Leinster's success, as well as Kildare's Dermot Early, specifically mentioned afterwards by Ulster manager Brian McEniff as a quality replacement to be able to bring into a match.

These occasional bursts of enthusiasm - and it would be naïve to try to infer a general trend - show why people within the games and sponsor Martin Donnelly retain a lingering loyalty for the interprovincials.

Watching Leinster was reminiscent of how Ulster became the specialist province in this competition over the past two decades, because the roles have been reversed during that period. When McEniff took over the fortunes of the northern province in the early 1980s, the football world was a different place.

For well over a decade the All-Ireland had become a duopoly between Munster and Leinster. The renaissance in Ulster football 10 years later in the early 1990s was said to have been based on the strides made on a number of non-county levels: the club success of Burren, the emergence of powerful Sigerson teams and Railway Cup domination.

It's too early to make similar claims for a couple of wins by Leinster over Ulster, but it's easy to see how the sense of a challenge has motivated Andrews' team.

The vast bulk of Saturday's starting team have known the bitterness and often enough humiliation of losing All-Ireland matches to northern opposition.

They have been aware of the status of Ulster football and the unflattering parallels drawn with Leinster. So far we're nowhere near the 23-year barren period experienced by northern counties between 1968-91, but by the time the counties take the tape next May, we'll be more than a third of the way there.

So the idea that they were taking up a challenge would have been more vivid in the winners' minds last weekend than would have been possible for the six Ulster players who represent the counties that have won three of the last five All-Irelands and National Leagues.

Interestingly, that same response was referred to in Connacht's surprising win over Munster the previous evening, coming as it did less than three weeks after the contemptuous dismissal of Mayo by Kerry in the All-Ireland final.

In just over a fortnight a panel of footballers will take on the most daunting challenge of the year, that of restoring equilibrium and national honour in the International Rules series.

That challenge has been distorted in the 12 months since last year's eventful series in Australia. The preposterous machismo and malevolent violence of the second Test completely obscured the main message of the series - that Australia had taken the international game to new heights as well as previously visited lows.

Ireland were poor, but Australia became the first side to break three digits in over 20 years of international competition. One feature of the series has been the way one country has moved ahead, prompting the other, through a varying combination of improvement and opposition complacency, to respond.

The most startling example of that was last year. Twelve months after Ireland thought they had reinvented the wheel in the course of demolishing Australia, the same thing happened in reverse.

Having appointed a regular club head coach, Kevin Sheedy, to take charge, the AFL reaped the advantage.

Sheedy's convictions on his preferred game plan led to a specific recruitment drive to find fast, skilful players, who despite being shorter than lamp-posts do not in the Aussie Rules game conform to the stereotypical, slightly-built corner forward. In other words, they have the strength and conditioning to look after themselves.

Their skills level enabled the Australians to register a startling improvement in kicking the round ball and their accuracy embarrassed Ireland.

The problem now is that with Sheedy still in charge the old escape route of Australian complacency - most noticeable in 2001 and 2004 - may have been shut off.

Listening to Sheedy's press conference announcing his team, you couldn't help but be struck by the sense of purpose.

For a long time it has been accepted that the international game has been a harder sell among Australian players than in Ireland. This is understandable, as the AFL close season is getting shorter and shorter and giving over three weeks to International Rules is a major commitment.

Yet there are indications Sheedy has created more of an aura around the series. The Australian coach said he had made the choice of his panel from 60 or 70 available players. He also articulated the ambivalence concerning the selection of Michael Voss, one of the great AFL players and a member of the Brisbane Lions three-in-a-row side who has announced his retirement.

Voss is seen as a contender for the one vacancy left in the panel, but Sheedy said the player's refusal to make himself available for Australia in the past was a problem and that if he were to be in charge long enough to get knocked back by the same player two or three times, he wouldn't be asking him again.

Today, Boylan makes the much-delayed announcement of his preliminary panel, which (minus any club-tied players) heads for a training weekend in Toulouse. No one will object to the delay if the selection gets it right.

The series' future is on the line. The game can't survive domination by one country. It is hoped that Ireland will be able to compete with the side that has redefined the international game. That's the challenge.