2002 draw stirs up an interesting brew

Galway and Tipperary won't need much inspiration when they open the defence of their All-Ireland titles next summer. The draw for the 2002 championship made on Saturday night set up both champions against their most fervent provincial rivals of recent years.

In both cases it's also a repeat of the challenges of this past summer. Galway start the defence of their football title against Roscommon, the side that beat them in Tuam in early June on route to winning the Connacht title, but were then toppled when the counties met again two months later in the new quarter-final stages.

Even greater rivalry can be expected when Tipperary start the defence of their Munster and All-Ireland hurling titles against Clare. It will be the fourth consecutive season that the sides have met in the championship and the seventh meeting since 1997.

The winners will then face Limerick in the semi-final, with Waterford and Cork playing-off in the other semi-final.

The only consolation is that both champions are now guaranteed a second chance. Last year saw Galway re-emerge from the football qualifier series, and a new hurling qualifier round to be introduced next summer will offer Tipperary a chance to do the same should they fall to Clare.

There were further familiarities in other areas of the draw. In the Ulster football championship, the pairings of Tyrone with Armagh and Derry with Antrim are repeats of this past summer, and Leinster football champions Meath are again likely to face Westmeath, should the latter come through against Carlow.

Galway manager John O'Mahony may still be contemplating his future with the county but he still sounded excited when commenting on the draw yesterday. Should Galway manage to come through against Roscommon then a semi-final with Mayo lies in wait.

"My first reaction overall is that it seems to guarantee huge games in the provinces right from the very start," he said. "And the situation in Connacht is particularly interesting in that you have the provincial champions, the League champions and the All-Ireland champions all on the same side of the draw. So I'm sure those games will fill a few seats."

There is a growing expectancy that O'Mahony will stay with Galway for another year, and with such a high-profile game from the very start, it won't take much to re-motivate his players.

"I suppose there are good and bad things about playing such strong teams so early in the summer," he added. "It does help teams to get keyed in a little earlier, but it also means you face a potential peak a little early as well.

"From a Galway point of view it's probably not ideal because we've only finished our season for about a month whereas some other teams are already back training. Of course it's hard to judge these sort of things so far in advance but it certainly throws out the window any argument about Connacht being the easy province to come out of."

For Meath, the beaten All-Ireland finalists, the Leinster campaign promises to be stern. The four semi-finalists of this summer - Meath, Dublin, Kildare and Offaly - were seeded directly into the quarter-finals, and the seven other counties went into the bowl for the first-round draw.

With Wexford receiving a bye and drawn to face Dublin, there is thus the potential of a semi-final meeting with Dublin and Meath. The open draw in Munster has also put Kerry and Cork in the same half, with Tipperary and Cork both drawing a bye directly into semi-finals. So Cork and Kerry are on course to meet in the semi-final should Kerry come through against Limerick.

Another big talking point for the winter months is the Munster hurling meeting of Cork and Waterford. It puts Justin McCarthy, Waterford's new hurling manager, in the awkward position of trying to plot the downfall of his native county.

With Kerry opting out of the Munster race this year, five counties went into the drum with the first three gaining a bye into semi-finals and the final two playing-off for their place. Some controversy appeared to loom when Munster secretary Donie Nealon actually dropped the second-last ball coming out of the drum, but as those final two counties were set to play each other, it didn't matter.

In Leinster, a preliminary round of seven counties was divided into two groups - Carlow, Meath, Wicklow and Laois, and, Kildare, Westmeath and Dublin. Kilkenny will once again face Offaly in one semi-final, with Wexford playing the preliminary winners in the other. Those counties will also be involved in the new qualifier round, to be made up of the three teams that fail to make the Munster and Leinster finals, plus Galway and the beaten Ulster finalists.

Central Council also decided to make some minor changes to the football qualifier series. Teams who have already met in the provincial championship cannot meet again until the All-Ireland semi-finals, avoiding the situation this summer where Galway and Roscommon, Tyrone and Derry and Meath and Westmeath all redrew each other in the quarter-finals. Similarly, teams that are drawn in the preliminary rounds of the Ulster and Leinster football championships cannot meet again in the first round of the qualifiers. It was also decided to give at least 13 days' recovery for teams beaten in the provincial finals.