Could the famous Millennium Cup be a template 20 years on?

Damian Stack Seán Walsh, who was County Board chairman in 2000, sees the Millennium Cup as a potential fixtures solution

ALL across the globe people were doing their part to mark the occasion. Firework spectaculars were planned in every major city in the world. Those cities most closely associated with the turning of one year to the next pulled out all the stops.

Edinburgh’s Hogmanay promised something particularly special. Sydney, as usual, got there before everyone else. Not that it stopped the rest of the world from ringing in the new century in style. New York and Paris, as befits their stature, refused to be outdone. For their part the British spent billions (yes billions!) on their new Dome on the bank of the Thames.

Believe it or not, and as trivial as it seems right now, the turning of the twentieth century to the twenty-first was a very big deal. Even Dublin got in on the act with the ill-fated ‘time in the slime’, sorry, the Millennium

Countdown Clock, which had to be yoinked out of the Liffey a few months after it was put in because (a) it leaked and (b) it couldn’t really tell the time.

Meanwhile, down here in the Kingdom moves were afoot to mark the new millennium in our own way, and Kerry being Kerry that meant only one thing – football. In the last couple of months of 1999 County Board officers weren’t quite partying like Prince, but they were making moves of their own.

It was decided to mark the new epoch with a special, oneoff competition: the Millennium Cup. Almost twenty years ago to the day, in March 2000, the draw for the first round of the new competition – which replaced the club championships that year – was taking place in Fexco’s offices in Killorglin.

Most of the names in that draw are as familiar to us now as then. Asdee v Cordal. Duagh v Keel. Fossa v Na Gaeil. One or two names stick out though. The first of those is Gale Rangers, which was a club based in North Kerry. The second was another North Kerry outfit, Ballyheigue. Neither of whom we’ve seen on a football field for quite some time.

The Millennium Cup marked the first time all clubs under the control of the County Board would compete in the same competition (bar leagues, and even within them you’ve got divisions). Little and large. Those leaden down with silverware and those without a pot to... well you know how it goes.

It was unprecedented and in its own way spectacular. Maybe it didn’t have all the bells and whistles of a Millennium Dome – probably it cost a little less too – but it captivated the football folk of Kerry for as long as it was underway. The main thing it was, was innovative. It was outsidethe-box thinking and it turned out to be a massive success.

As it happens, the moment we’re living through calls for outside-the-box thinking and innovation. Plans have been completely and utterly torn up.

Had everything proceeded according to plan, clubs would now be coming off the second of two rounds of County League action and gearing up for the club month of April.

Instead of preparing for the club championships, all sporting activity – bar horse and greyhound racing, which continues behind closed doors – has ceased. The best laid plans of County Board officers, club managers, county managers and national fixture-makers have been completely sundered.

It’s the single biggest challenge faced by the GAA in decades. Of course, that challenge pales into insignificance compared to the challenges faced by society at large, but sport is important too. It gives us something to look forward to and it’s the restorative power of sport we’ll all be looking to in the months ahead.

“The way I would look at it is this, and I’ve thought about it and it might not be everyone’s cup of tea: when this is over everyone will want a lift and they’ll want a continuous lift for a couple of months, right?” asks Seán Walsh, who was County Board chairman at the turn of the millennium.

“And I see that there’s nothing better to give them a lift than national hurling and football at the highest level, and I think it will happen, depending on when we come back, that we’ll get back to playing.

“I don’t think we’ll get back to playing [All-Ireland Championships] before July. What I’d be suggesting is that they play the Championships to their conclusion and if that takes July, August, September and even into October to complete the Championship, some time around that. Play the All-Ireland Championships and then give the counties a chance to play [county] championships and then start again in January with your National Leagues.

“Forego the provincial club championships and the All-Ireland club championships for this year, for this winter, because you’re not going to get everything into the schedule. Something will have to go.

“That’s my first reaction, plenty of games when people will need them to recuperate and get back to some kind of normality.”

With that imperative to get the inter-county scene up and running as soon as possible, that in turn will leave the County Board in a real bind as to how to proceed once they get going again. It will require all options being looked at, including, perhaps, a re-run of something that proved so successful twenty years ago.

“They’ll [the County Board] be in awful straits for one very simple reason: they will have no intermediate, novice or junior club championship played,” Walsh explains.

“Then the county [team] is going to take precedence, that’s always going to be the case, and when the Championship gets underway the county players are going to be tied up with that. So the Millennium Cup type situation is a perfect idea for how you might do it then and accommodate everyone all the way up along.

“The problem at the moment is, the problem that they face is, when you start playing inter-county football then that compacts it for everyone. If we have a situation then where we want to start our [domestic] championship when that finishes on this basis and run it straight through and everyone can play

every Sunday.

“The winners play the next day and the losers play in junior, intermediate on a scale going up. You worked your way from the bottom up. You played and you kept playing and when you were knocked out [you kept playing]. The higher you went the higher chances you had of playing in a higher competition and when you were knocked out then you went into your own competition.”

In 2000 the Millennium Cup was played alongside the County Championship. The winner of the Millennium Cup – Glenflesk – went forward to represent the county in the Munster and All-Ireland Club series, but the traditional County Championship with districts and clubs in competition for the Bishop Moynihan Cup went ahead as normal.

With the 2020 season certain to take place over a condensed period of time, that simply won’t be possible this time around. As Moyvane man Walsh explains, choices will have to be taken, even if they’re not particularly palatable.

“Everything will depend on when we’ll start, but if the start is too late, maybe this is the only option and in the final then the finalists play for the Bishop Moynihan Cup, and no district teams for the year that’s in it,” he says.

“That would be a blow, but there will be certain scenarios that will not please everyone for playing championships this year. That’s the first thing you’ve got to take into account. If there is championship, we will not be able to play every championship that we know.

“We won’t be able to play intermediate, junior, senior and all the way up along and then play an inter-county calendar at the same time. You see how difficult it is in a regular year and then divide that by a third, take four months out of it. Something is going to have to give, whatever that is. To ensure that every club player gets a fair crack at the whip, a solution would probably be a Millennium Cup type situation.

“Everyone starts and you play an FA Cup-type situation for the top to the bottom and they all had a chance to win a competition then at their own level when their own level is established.”

Going back twenty years, the Millennium Cup was “a huge success”, according to Walsh. So successful, in fact, that “people thought that it was a competition that could be maintained.”

“There was big crowds, the big draw was the chance of a big team coming to town. It was a novelty at the time,” he says.

“The one thing it did for me was it gave clubs the chance to play teams that they never would have got the chance to play, because in championship we are cocooned into our grades and even in league and that’s the same now.

“The Novice championship is a replica of Division 4 or 5. The Junior championship is maybe Division 3 or 4 or something like that. So it gave teams the opportunity to play teams that they would never get a chance to play. Even grades and grades above them.”

It was all hugely exciting and, the thing is, it could be again. Out of these most trying of times, creativity can spring forth. When we’re finally cut loose from the bonds of social distancing and self-isolation, we’ll be ready to embrace life with even more gusto than before. We’ll be ready to embrace football.

A Millennium Cup style solution may or may not be the correct way of dealing with the fixtures crunch that’s sure to follow the present storm, but it’s an idea worth considering. Whatever way it plays out, Seán Walsh is right: people are going to want something to lift the soul. What was good enough to celebrate the dawning of a new century is surely good enough to kick-start life again in a couple of months’ time.

Everyone starts and you play an FA Cup type situation from the top to the bottom and they all have a chance to win a competition then at their own level – Seán Walsh