Focus falls on Leinster in draw for 2012 championship

GAELIC GAMES NEWS ROUND-UP:WITH THIS evening's draw for the 2012 championship comes the inevitable if not somewhat premature shift in focus towards next year, and perhaps the refocusing of the minds of the players and managers still contemplating their future.

All four provinces will be staging their respective draws at GAA headquarters (live on RTÉ2, from 8pm), although the headlines are likely to come from Leinster, and who will first face-off against the defending All-Ireland champions in football and hurling.

Dublin will be one of four seeded counties in the Leinster football championship, along with Kildare, Wexford, and Carlow – and will thus go straight into the quarter-finals. Likewise, Kilkenny will be one of the seeded teams in the Leinster hurling championship, and will go straight into the semi-finals – which means, like this year, they could win the All-Ireland title with just four victories.

With the format for the 2012 hurling league still undecided, completing the GAA master fixture list before the end of next month will, as GAA director general Páraic Duffy admitted earlier this week, be “very tight”.

The GAA have agreed one change to the process in that before the provincial councils set their schedules, the TV rights holders will first state their preferred live matches, thereby reducing the likelihood of having some of the bigger games conflicting with each other.

The main interest in the Munster football championship will, as usual, be on when Kerry will play Cork. Kerry might still licking the wounds of the All-Ireland defeat to Dublin, but forward Darran O’Sullivan’s reckons there’s no reason they can’t all be back to make amends in 2012, including the so-called aging defence.

“People talk about ages, 31 or 32,” says O’Sullivan. “But sure look at the rugby fellas. They’re taking serious belts, every week, and some of them are the same age. So I don’t really see the issue.

“Look at some of our older players. Tom O’Sullivan (32). Biggest day of the year and again another cracking game. Marc Ó Sé (31), Tomás (33) . . . these fellas come back year after year. I have so much respect for them, because what they do, the bigger the day, they bigger they play. So I’d hope they’d all stay on. In my eyes they’ve plenty of legs left.

“Obviously it would be nice too for some of the younger lads to put pressure on them too, which they probably will. But those older fellas don’t owe anything to anyone. They’ve been around so long, and I just think some of them will be too proud to leave it on a defeat, and hopefully we’ll have the full complement back again.”

O’Sullivan, like most of his team-mates, also reckons the final was a game Kerry probably left behind: “In all my experience with Kerry the one thing we’ve always been good at is closing out leads. Or if we’re down a couple of points with 10 minutes to go we’re always confident we’ll work a score. For whatever reason on the day, I don’t know, did we get ahead of ourselves? But we let it slip.

“But you have to give Dublin a bit of credit. They worked hard, pulled us back, got a good goal. And sure what can you say about Cluxton’s kick? In fairness that took nerves of steel.

“We’d a good enough year overall. But still it’s a failure. It was just one of those things. We’d a good enough game against Dublin, but in the end maybe there was a bit of complacency, that we thought we’d had it won.”

The theory that Kerry found it harder to get frees is something O’Sullivan doesn’t necessarily deny: “Look, I’d be lying if I didn’t say there were a few frees there that we should have got. More than the other away around. But that wasn’t the losing of the game. There were a few funny decisions. Anyone who saw the game would agree with that. But that’s not why we lost.”

Pat Gilroy’s future as Dublin football manager might be clearer tomorrow evening after he holds a team meeting for the first time since the All-Ireland win. Although his three-year term is up, Gilroy has the backing of the players and county board to continue.

What is certain is that John Allen will be named Limerick hurling manager. The independent three-man selection committee has informed the Limerick County Board Allen is their choice, and this will be recommended by the county executive this evening, before ratification at the full board meeting next Tuesday.

- Fergal ODonnell has ended his three-year tenure as Roscommon manager. O’Donnell led the county to their first Connacht Senior title last year when they beat Sligo. They again reached the Connacht decider this year, where they were defeated by Mayo.