TEAM OF THE CHAMPIONSHIP

Choosing a team of the championship has the potential to leave you open to quite a bit of criticism. Some people will cry foul as to why player X or player Y wasn’t included here and, look, there’s no harm in that. That’s pretty much the fun of these things. It’s more of a device to stoke debate than a definitive judgement on the championship as a whole.

It’s also a really hard thing to do given that it was physically impossible for somebody to have been at every single championship game played. The team you see above is, by necessity, the work of many hands or rather many pairs of eyes.

In as much as was possible we’ve tried to stick to choosing players in their positions. The only time we deviated from that was when we decided to put Ivan Parker on the half-forward line. Parker was so good in this year’s championship that it felt like it would be a real omission to leave him out. The three selected for the inside line you see just had to be included – David Clifford, Paul Geaney and Tony Brosnan were the stars of the championship.

In reality we had a surplus of forward talent to choose from. Probably in any other year guys like Tommy Walsh, Gavin O’Brien, Micheál Burns or Darragh Roche would be included. Then you’ve got somebody like Matthew Flaherty who played as a sweeper for the most part – was he one of the fifteen best players in this year’s championship? Tell you what, he wasn’t far off.

The thing about having all these great options up front is that they didn’t exactly make life easy on defenders throughout the competition, which made life difficult on us selectors when it came to choosing the six best defenders in the competition. We opted for Seán T Dillon off the back of two exceptional performances for Feale Rangers. True enough Feale Rangers lost both those games and Dillon didn’t get a chance to impress into October, but he was so good in those two games that you can’t really mark him down for that.

Those are the sort of compromises you have to make. After last Sunday Michael Moloney shot into contention for the full-back’s berth after keeping Paul Geaney (the player of the championship) quiet. Shane Fitzmaurice and Pat Corridan put in excellent displays there earlier in the competition, but on the big day Moloney stood tall. You can’t overlook that either.

Bryan Sheehan can be considered unlucky, but Johnny Buckley and David Moran were both key men at midfield for their sides.

Agree with us or disagree with us we hope our team of the championship provides some food for thought and debate!