Knockout ‘appeal’ does little for likes of Tubridy
IN SIX days’ time, the Clare footballers will be done for the year. They play Kerry in the Munster championship next Saturday night. The game will be played in Fitzgerald Stadium, regularly cited as the most picturesque GAA venue on the island. For their rivals in Munster, it must hold all the attraction of an abattoir.
Kerry’s control of football in the province long ago became ancient fact, but the extraordinariness of a second pandemic championship emphasises it anew.
With the football competition played for the second year in a row on a straight knock-out basis, it means that there is no consolation for a county like Clare.
In previous years, they would not have travelled to Killarney with fattened hopes of causing an upset, but there was at least the security of the qualifiers.
The back-door system was once contentious in the GAA, but the extent to which it transformed the inter-county Championship has been freshly emphasised over the past year.
The appeal of the old-school knock-out format is linked to nostalgia, which has soothed and consoled swathes of the population since the onset of the pandemic.
One could safely guess, however, that those charms do not extend to members of the Clare football panel, or their peers in Sligo, Westmeath, Antrim and elsewhere.
Clare are especially relevant given how well they played in the curtailed League format.
They beat Laois and Kildare in the first two rounds of Division Two South, that second result coming in Newbridge.
In the final round, they lost to a last-minute point to Cork in Ennis, but being edged out in a gripping contest was cushioned by a place in a promotion semi-final.
The vigorous challenge they gave Mayo in that meeting validated their earlier displays in the campaign, but it was also a reflection of the progress they have made under Colm Collins in the eight seasons he has been in charge.
His work in bringing Clare to within 70 minutes of Division One football is one of the more impressive, if understated, stories in the modern game.
He has led them out of Division
Four to a level where they have retained their status in Division
Two for four seasons.
They were All-Ireland quarterfinalists in 2016.
They are now a proven force in the second tier of the game, precisely the kind of opposition that more storied counties would dread to face in a Saturday evening qualifier.
The necessary restrictions forced on the GAA by Covid-19 means that the older firms will be shielded from that danger this year, and Clare’s latest impressive season will almost certainly be quietly, definitively shut down before the month of June is up.
Nostalgia for the knock-out structure comes at a price.
It means, for instance, that the tremendous story of David Tubridy will probably not extend much past the longest day of the year.
Tubridy is 34, a veteran with a service to Clare football extending back a decade and a half.
He was expected to be one of the departures from the panel after their Championship loss to Tipperary last winter.
Instead, he returned for one more tilt, while storied peers like Gary Brennan and Gordon Kelly retired.
In that tight loss to Cork in round three of the League, Tubridy scored 1-8, and learned after the match that his tally meant he had overtaken the legendary Mickey Kearns of Sligo as the leading scorer in League history.
His total at the end of play that evening was 478 points, comprised of 22 goals and 412 points. He tacked on another three points against Mayo.
The League is obviously a more conducive environment to big scores as counties are pitted against sides of a similar level – most of the time.
In the case of Clare, Tubridy was scoring at a fevered rate in Division Four and has continued that through to Division Two.
His story provides another glimpse of the talent which Collins has allowed to flourish. But it’s an adventure that won’t get extensive airtime in the Championship.
Clare could spring one of the biggest surprises in the history of the competition, but Kerry are unlikely to get caught, especially after they were undone so dramatically by Cork last year.
The big teams learn their lessons, and the result will mean Clare’s year closes and they will be quickly forgotten about, until the League resumes next spring and everyone remembers they are in Division Two, and we marvel at them again.
Their circumstances are a reminder of why the knock-out method is fit for emergency use only.