McGrath aggravates old knee injury

Gaelic Games: Ken McGrath is the latest Waterford hurler to become an injury doubt for the Munster championship.

One of the most gifted players in the game, McGrath had only come back from a knee injury during the closing stages of the National Hurling League but it has emerged that aggravation of the injury during the league quarter-final against Limerick has jeopardised his championship prospects.

"It's a recurrence of the same knee injury," said county PRO John Jackson, "and unfortunately, it's not looking great at the moment. His club say he will be out for the county championship matches in the middle of May and our Munster semi-final is only two weeks after that."

This latest setback for Justin McCarthy's side comes on top of the imminent suspensions for Eoin Kelly and Paul Flynn and the news that John Mullane had broken his arm in a club challenge on Saturday. The players concerned are arguably the county's four best hurlers. "John was operated on, on Saturday night," according to Jackson, "but he has had a plate inserted which isn't due to be removed for seven weeks."

Waterford's championship date with either Tipperary or Limerick is less than six weeks away with the Munster final due three weeks after that.

The fate of Kelly and Flynn won't be known for a while, as it was decided to hold back their hearings until the new committees, appointed by incoming president Nickey Brennan, take up their duties. It is feared that Kelly could be facing a 12-week suspension, which would rule him out of the entire provincial championship but there are hopes that Flynn may escape with a shorter ban. Both McGrath and Flynn were carrying injuries in the lead-up to last year's championship opener against Cork.

Meanwhile in the fallout after Sunday's generally poor attendances at the National League finals and semi-finals the GAA's head of marketing has blamed a confluence of circumstances for the situation in which the association found itself. "This was an extraordinary weekend. Effectively, French television made the call by taking Saturday for the Biarritz semi-final. If the Munster-Leinster European Cup match had been on Saturday there'd have been no problem. And had congress not been on at the weekend, we could have used the Saturday. We wouldn't normally have had congress taking place so late either.

"The National Leagues are so tightly scheduled that we don't really have time in hand to delay fixtures any further at this time of the year. There were so many considerations with the under-21 semi-finals being played as well. It's very hard to market events properly when you only know the identity of teams six days beforehand."

Pressure on dates, he believes, will start to ease in the years ahead as floodlit venues start to come on stream. "That will allow us to stage matches midweek if we have to and if you'd had them in Limerick at the weekend it might have made Saturday evening an option for the league football final given that it's near enough to Killarney."

One of the paradoxes of the weekend was it seemed to indicate there has been greater interest in the opening phases of the National Leagues than in the concluding matches. Even allowing for the circumstances of a very late throw-in, the 7,598 attendance at the Kerry-Galway final was very poor but two years ago when the same counties played the final in Croke Park together with the Offaly-Down Division Two final, only 28,000 attended.

Power believes that perhaps the shadow of the championship is falling over the leagues at this stage of the year and feels that there is merit in a proposal from the GAA's head of games.

"Pat Daly says in his report that there's a case for a natural league format rather than involving teams in play-off matches at the end of the round-robin format.

"My personal opinion is that there's something in that. Although this was a one-off set of circumstances the closer to the championship you get the more people are looking over their shoulder. That's natural."

The intercounty career of Galway footballer Richie Fahey, twice an All-Ireland medal winner, could be at an end following a serious knee injury. The player, a brother of 2001 All-Ireland winning captain Gary and women's All-Ireland medallist Niamh, was injured in training on Thursday night as Galway finalised their preparations for the league final against Kerry and was ruled out of the game in Limerick.

It was confirmed over the weekend that Fahey had torn a cruciate knee ligament, which will rule him out for the rest of the year.