Dubs set for Sunday showdown with Kerry
Mayo retain almost half of their 2010 squad
DUBLIN’S Allianz League Division 1 match with Kerry may have to go ahead on Sunday week because of concerns over Garda manpower in the capital the previous day.
A decision on re-fixtures will be made on Monday but already it seems like Dublin’s home match with Kerry, originally scheduled for Croke Park tomorrow night, will go ahead on Sunday March 11 instead of its regular Saturday-night slot.
With the Ireland v Scotland Six Nations rugby match on in Dublin on Saturday March 10 and a ‘Rally for Life’ also due to take place in the city centre that afternoon, Garda preference is understood to be for the game to be pushed back a further day, rather than stretching resources to cover a Saturday night Croke Park fixture.
A weekend wipe-out for sports fixtures because of the weather saw the entire Allianz football and hurling league programmes being postponed.
Munster’s, Ulster’s, and Leinster’s Guinness PRO14 matches have also been shelved.
Disruption at Dublin Airport was among the factors considered in postponing Leinster’s trip to Scarletts until later in the season.
Munster were due to fly to Edinburgh yesterday for their match tonight but that has now been rescheduled for St Patrick’s weekend.
Only Connacht are in action this weekend as they are in South Africa to play the Cheetahs. The GAA brought forward a decision on the league fixtures by 24 hours when it became clear that a predicted weekend thaw would not come quick enough, leaving a majority of venues still unplayable.
All games will now be pushed back a week with the last round of the hurling leagues to be played next Sunday.
The hurling quarter-finals will go ahead on Sunday, March 18 with the semi-finals set to take place on March 25. The knock-on effect is that the Division 1 league final will now go ahead on Saturday, March 31, provided there are no further disruptions between now and then.
IN just one week last month players from a host of different counties slipped out the back door of their respective inter-county dressing rooms, signing off for the rest of the season at their own discretion.
The reasons were varied, some opting to travel, others committing to final exams while an imbalance between the commitment required and the projected yield may also have been a factor.
Niall Keenan and Ciarán McFaul from Derry, Down’s Gerard McGovern and Louth pair Conall McKeever and Patrick Reilly were followed a week later by Roscommon’s Seán Muloolly and Niall McInerney.
McInerney is to return for the championship but for the rest, it will be 2019 before they return, that’s if they return at all.
In other counties, there are similar less heralded exits that don’t make news. In the inter-county game, the revolving doors never pause.
Inevitably, those doors move that little bit quicker in football’s lower divisions than they do at the top.
It’s only two years ago that Denis Connerton, on returning to inter-county management with Longford after 11 years away, revealed how 40 per cent of the players he had invited on to his initial squad had declined. Later that year Galway manager Kevin Walsh (below) suggested over
50 players had turned down invitations to come in and either trial or train under his management since he had taken over in the autumn of 2014. Walsh surely doesn’t have that problem now as Galway enjoy the view from the top of the Allianz Division 1 after four successive wins.
And Connerton’s Longford have been stringing together some decent performances in Division 3 to make them a more attractive proposition than they were in 2016.
But that doesn’t avoid the inescapable conclusion that the turnover of players will be far greater among teams in the lower divisions than the top.
Last year an Irish Independent analysis of players who were still committed to their counties since the start of the decade came up with in excess of
190 names. The criteria used was game-time in the 2010 championship. In just over 12 months some established names have departed – Kerry’s Colm Cooper, Aidan O’Mahony and Bryan Sheehan, Tyrone’s Seán Cavanagh, Donegal’s Karl Lacey, Mayo’s Alan Dillon, Dublin’s Denis Bastick, Sligo’s Mark Breheny and Cork’s Michael Shields and Alan O’Connor among the most high profile of them.
But at the other end departures are felt even more keenly. Limerick’s Ian Ryan and Pádraig Browne have both slipped away quietly, Waterford manager Tom McGlinchey could have done with Patrick Hurney around for another season, while Leitrim have lost Gary Reynolds, leaving them without a single survivor from their 2010 championship team. That list goes on.
RETAINED
The ‘class of 2010’ is down to 140 just seven seasons later from the approximately 760 players who would have featured in that year’s championship.
As the decade’s protagonists making most All-Ireland final appearances, Dublin and Mayo have retained most players since 2010.
Remarkably, of the 25 players that featured in Mayo’s two championship games in 2010, defeats to Sligo and Longford, 12 are still committed to the cause of chasing down that elusive All-Ireland title.
Dublin used more players under Pat Gilroy that year but still retain 10, five All-Ireland titles in the meantime failing to blunt their hunger.
Regular provincial title winners Kerry and Monaghan are among those with the biggest retention figures with some 53 players from the eight current Division 1 teams, more than double the numbers still present in Division 4 where there are still just 26 by our count.
Against the grain, however, are the numbers retained by Carlow
(nine) and Laois (eight), the Division
4 pacesetters. While London and Leitrim have no survivors from 2010, Limerick have just Seamus O’Carroll, and Waterford’s Tommy Prendergast and Thomas O’Gorman stay the pace, both Division 4 pacesetters buck that trend.
“That bunch, some would have been on that good minor team in
2007 (when they reached a Leinster minor final,” said current Carlow senior manager Turlough O’Brien. “They have been fantastic servants throughout that time, most have been there every year,” he added. What
makes their commitment all the more noteworthy is that they have played all of their league football in Division 4 during that time.
“In the period since then, we’ve had a lot of difficult years where maybe the set-up wasn’t what it should have been when our lads didn’t commit,” added O’Brien.
“We struggled in the league and we finished close to bottom a few times as well. But they stuck with it, they’re model footballers and have been the backbone in those years. There is a lot of respect locally that they have been so committed to it with no return.
There is a huge turnover among players in these divisions, probably among the rest of our panel there is that level of turnover too but those (nine) guys are there all the time,” he said.
Division 2 (29) and Division 3 (31) come nowhere near the top-flight numbers either with Cavan, Meath, Derry, Roscommon and Armagh among the counties with the biggest turnovers in that seven-year period.
Some careers reach even further back. From the 140 who have a footprint in the 2010 championship, 22 can make claims to the 2005 championship too. Fermanagh’s Ryan Mc- Cluskey and Stephen Cluxton are out on their own for length of service in years but also still around are: Darran O’Sullivan and Kieran Donaghy (Kerry), Seán Armstrong (Galway), David Clarke, Keith Higgins, Andy Moran and Barry Moran (all Mayo), Colm Begley and Ross Munnelly (Laois), Eamonn Maguire (Fermanagh), Vinny Corey (Monaghan), Mark Lynch (Derry), Cavan’s Seán Johnston and Cian Mackey (Cavan), Eamonn Callaghan (Kildare), Charlie Harrison (Sligo), Seánie McDermott (Roscommon) and James Stafford and Ciarán Hyland (Wicklow).