IT’S WIDE OPEN
Championship fever is gaining momentum and Galway’s re-emergence has sent anticipation soaring for the summer
THE more things change, the more they stay the same. Go back 20 years and the big gap between League and Championship was just as pronounced as it is now, that long calm before the storm.
You can become a bit hypocritical and criticise the current problems, in terms of fixtures and club players playing second fiddle, even though it was exactly the same when I was playing.
And yet I had to smile when I saw Dublin football manager Jim Gavin as a special guest at an AIB club function recently. Dublin club football operates entirely at the whims of the county team whose success has meant a couple of rounds is played and then the whole competition goes into cold storage until the autumn.
Perhaps a straight knock-out, in terms of the senior championship, is designed to suit the county team but it’s a system from another era. Gavin has always been vocal in his support for clubs, but the format is doing club players no favours.
Being part of a high-achieving Offaly team that considered ourselves All-Ireland contenders, I always think back to 1991, ’92 and ’93 when we were beaten in the first round of the Leinster Championship. That’s three matches in three years. We has a long year to think about where it all went wrong.
When you’re cocooned in the county set up, you don’t realise how the club scene gets left on hold. It’s later on, when you become involved with club teams, that it’s all too clear. The club I’m involved with in Offaly at the moment, Ballinamere, played a minor hurling final last October and haven’t played a competitive match since. And we were one of the lucky ones. Other teams were knocked out in July.
Then you have the first minor hurling round fixed for May 24 with football on May 26 – and the Leaving Cert starting the following week. The neglect of clubs is rife. As a county player, it’s aroun now that the championship begins to really excite.
Some people think we didn’t train but we put in the winter programme like everyone else. I remember Babs Keating had Johnny Murray having us in the gym in Shinrone, nearly in Roscrea, and the hard labour that went into that.
St Patrick’s Day was always the flagship for me.
We generally had a match or training and then a good blowout after, a few pints.
From being shunted around from Banagher to Birr or wherever we could get a pitch during the winter, once the long evenings came, the whole camp shifted to Tullamore. The surface was always brilliant.
That’s when Championship fever kicked in. That was what our whole team was about, what every player lived for.
Tommy Walsh, JJ Delaney and Aidan Fogarty were on radio last weekend, talking about the buzz of what happened inside the gates of Nowlan Park and we also had brilliant training matches.
If you were going to be marking Brian Whelahan, you’d nearly be thinking about it all day.
I generally lined out at 12 or 15. If you had to switch to the other wing, you had Kevin Martin for company. Martin Hanamy was in the corner, Kevin Kinahan at full-back. There was no soft option.
Billy Dooley was an easy-going character but had to live in at right corner-forward on Hanamy who approached every training like he did a knock-out championship.
Going out and playing a Championship match against another county must have felt like a break for Billy.
Every night you’d go in, you’d see something special. Martin, Kinahan, Hanamy – they were all gladiators. But for pure skill, the likes of John Troy dazzled. He could mind himself, too. There was a steel there as well. He was very quick to pull under a dropping ball.
The same for me marking Whelahan. I have some brilliant memories from that.
He could make an absolute fool out of you when the mood took him. A ball would break and he’d be gone and have it over the bar at the other end.
If he was going back towards his own goal, he had this uncanny ability to make space to clear the ball. When you tried to second guess him and go one way, he third guessed you. He was always one step ahead.
Same with Johnny Dooley who always seemed to pop up in acres of space. He could score five points in the blink of an eye. Then you had Johnny Pilkington adding the banter in the middle of it.
That’s the magic that comes when Championship is in the air.
The Leinster Championship was wide open in the 1990s and Galway’s National League win suggests it should be a really competitive All-Ireland competition this summer.
For the last few years, it’s been about Kilkenny and Tipperary with Galway coming closest to either of them.
It remains to be seen though whether the landscape will really change.
Other than Clare’s breakthrough in 2013, the evidence isn’t there yet. It’s been one step forward, two steps back at times for other counties.
Clare have failed to kick on while Waterford have looked like the coming team.
But we’ll have to see Galway actually beating Kilkenny and Waterford getting the better of the likes of Tipperary, to believe hurling is about to embrace a more democratic era once again.