It’s car-crash qualification!
Demolition name of game in final round
The impact of losing a final drains teams
IT IS by design the ultimate carcrash round. What happens when one force gifted with momentum runs into another t hat has stalled? Inevitably, there are fatalities every time, but you are twice as likely to perish if you are i n the vehicle whose engine has cut while driving in the fast lane.
For all the talk about how vulnerable the sixday turnaround l eaves beaten provincial finalists (and it’s likely cold comfort to the footballers of Donegal and London today that they will be the last to endure it), in truth it’s the nature of the beast that their life-expectancy is not hectic anyway.
Supporters of Cork and Meath should look away too now; the stats tell us that in the fourth round of the All-Ireland football qualifiers the beaten provincial finalists are twice as likely to lose as the team surfing the wave of momentum coming through from the early rounds.
Since the advent of the qualifiers i n 2001, the records show that the beaten provincial finalists have won just 16 and lost 32 of the 48 games that have been played.
In one sense it makes none at all, even allowing for the imbalances of the provincial system — any team that reaches a provincial final can lay claim to a serious streak of form, but the impact of losing a final drains teams like nothing else.
That is particularly the case when the roof on a team’s ambition reaches no higher than winning a provincial final, and they simply have neither the stomach nor the inclination to get stuck back into the qualifiers.
Limerick, along with Cork and Mayo, have accessed this round four times as provincial finalists and lost every time — on the one occasion in 2011 when they reached the quarter-finals, they did so through the qualifiers.
In truth, this year’s quartet of beaten finalists should not suffer like that. London’s ambition was sated in reaching a provincial final but their presence in Croke Park today adds to the sense of democracy that the qualifiers have brought to the Championship in that only three counties — Waterford, Carlow and Leitrim — have not made to the last 12.
Meath’s only realistic opportunity of a trophy vanished in the Leinster final defeat to Dublin, but after losing in the fourth round last year, their own sense of self-worth should see them refocus and challenge Tyrone on an even footing for a quarter-final place.
But for the heavy-hitters of defending All-Ireland champions Donegal and Cork this is business as usual. Even if the six-day turnaround and the fact that they lost out on an historic third Ulster title in a row provide fertile ground for serious hangover, serious teams, as Donegal undoubtedly are, can still arrive here and use this round as a launch pad.
Not many, mind. Only Tyrone (2005) and Kerry (2006) have bounced back from losing a provincial final to go on and win the All-Ireland, but for others who have managed to sur- vive this round i t has turned out to be something of a dead man’s bounce. Of the 16 wins recorded in the fourth round, 10 have lost next-time out at the quarter-final stage with only Cork, semi-final in 2005 and final in ’07, Kerry, final in ’08, and Wexford, semifinal in ’08, making it past the last eight.
What that underlines is the difficultly that faces strong teams who discover their flaws too late in the year to allow for nothing more than a patch- up repair job when a thorough overhaul may be required. That’s t he common ground that both Cork and Donegal share his weekend, but the former appear to be in the better place.
They reacted to their Munster final defeat to Kerry three weeks ago by dropping half a dozen players for today’s clash with Galway, hardly a surprise given that they had finished that game with a stronger one than they had finished.
But then they are in a better position than Donegal to make an adjustment of that scale, and not just because they have had more time, and critically, more depth to their panel, but also because they have arrived more open to change.
There is one final stat hovering over Donegal’s heads as they eyeball Laois in Carrick-on-Shannon this evening; they are only the third reigning All-Ireland champions to have lost a provincial final since the advent of the qualifiers, and both Kerry in 2008 and Cork in 2011 never found a way to defend their crowns.
In a way t hat is a cheap shot given how notoriously difficult is it to defend the All-Ireland title — Kerry in 2006-07 are the only ones to have done so in the last 23 years — but champions are never prepared for wholesale change in the middle of the season of their title defence.
The human condition demands that they stay loyal to the personnel and to the game plan that not only took them to the title but also carried them so far down the road in its defence.
And when the realisation dawns that it is not enough, it can just be too late to do anything about it.