Welcome to the All-Ireland football championship - there has never been one like it

A dressing room tunnel in Clones, back in the middle of the league. Monaghan had just beaten Roscommon in round four of Division One and though the wind whistling through the place would skin you, we were insisting on talking about the summer anyway. Wishcasting, we could call it. You might have another name for it.

The question was for Vinny Corey, the Monaghan boss. Throughout his playing career, Game Four of the league generally took place either 11 or 12 weeks out from the start of the championship. Now, settling into his first campaign as an intercounty manager, four games under his team’s belt meant that championship was a mere six weeks away.

You want to know how tight a window six weeks is? Well, said championship starts today, Easter Saturday. In six weeks’ time, the first group games in the All-Ireland series will take place. The provincial championships will already be boxed off and the first round of Tailteann Cup games will be in the books. Six weeks is no time at all. But you can get a lot done in six weeks, all the same.

So the question to Corey was this. Given the proximity to the big dance, just how much pre-show limbering up was his team doing? And how much should they be doing? And how the hell do you decide this stuff anyway?

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“It definitely has a bearing,” Corey told us. “There are training blocks to be done and there are times when you do them before league games and your performance dips. But I think teams realise that they have to do them and take that chance. We’re probably in the same boat.

“It comes down to the distance out from the championship game. When’s the best time to do it? I don’t totally understand it – the boys with the science do and I take my guidance from them. There still is a reasonable gap between the start of the Ulster championship and the start of the All-Ireland championship.

“The honest answer is that nobody really knows yet what the best approach will be because nobody has gone through it yet. People are guessing. I think you’re going to have to feel your way through it a bit for this first season anyway.”

It was at this point that your correspondent concluded that just this once, it was going to be okay to not know. And that readers should feel free to relax and avoid getting overly wound up as well. Not knowing what the 2023 football championship has in store for us all is an entirely legit state of mind. If the teams themselves are flying blind, who are we to pretend to have all the answers?

Here’s what we do know. There has never been an All-Ireland championship like the one that’s about to push out onto the luge chute and hurtle down the track to July. The next 16 weeks will see 99 matches played out across the country, split between provincial championships, round-robins, straight knockout and Tailteann Cup. That’s up from 60 last year and 32 in the last Covid championship in 2021.

In other words, the additional number of games in this championship (39) comfortably outstrips the amount there was in the whole programme just two years ago. The dear old football championship – that ancient, careworn jalopy that once carted generations through the Irish summer – has been souped up and blinged out beyond all recognition.

It’s bigger than ever, it’s faster than ever, it offers more teams more games than ever. New York aside, the fewest games any county will play is four. Even if they lose every time they tog out – and they won’t – the likes of Waterford and London and Carlow will each play as many championship matches in the next eight weeks as they have in the past three years.

At the other end of the scale, the lowest number of matches it will take to win Sam Maguire is now eight, which is equal to the most any champions have ever played. And even that luxury is only available to the Munster teams. Everyone else has a slate of at least nine matches to get through if they’re going to win it all – 10 if they don’t top their round-robin group, possibly even 11 in the case of Armagh, for whom base camp is the Ulster preliminary round.

So it’s all going to take a bit of getting used to. Take the first weekend of June as an example – the second round of the Sam Maguire group stage coinciding with the final set of round robin games in the Tailteann Cup. If that all seems a bit abstract written down, think of it like this – it’s 16 games in total, meaning that for the first time in the history of the GAA, 32 counties will be playing championship football in a single weekend.

As a result, the reality is that most of it will pass you by. The poor bastards in The Sunday Game are already being fitted for flak jackets. You think your county got limited coverage before? You only think you’ve seen nothing yet. The addition of a Saturday highlights programme and the ramp-up of GAAGo’s offering are great and necessary but unless there’s a clause in the new broadcast deal that adds an eighth day to the week, it’s going to be mighty hard to keep up.

We’ll give it a go, all the same. Much of the fun in the next few weeks will be in parsing what exactly it is that we’re watching. As a starting point, everyone presumes that the provincial championships are a tattered coat upon a stick. Are they, though?

If Mayo and Roscommon hit the furlong pole upsides in Castlebar tomorrow in front of a close to capacity crowd, which of them is going to be inclined to take a pull on the reins? Either? Neither? Do they have a preference should the situation arise? The winners get Galway in a fortnight, the losers get six weeks to do with as they wish. Which is the better outcome? Is there even a way of knowing?

(The bigger question, of course, is how a competition going through its 4,356th format change in a decade can still end up with such glaring anomalies in the way it ferries teams through the tournament. But sure if we started answering that we’d be getting into the Guantanamo realm of structural chat and, by all accounts, the future of newspapers is looking dicey enough as it is so let’s leave that one there, shall we?)

The upshot is we won’t really be able to say we know much of anything until the round-robin games get underway. And even then, it’s going to be 24 games to cut 16 teams down to 12. Given that one of the 16 is going to be a Division Four side and another will be last year’s Tailteann champions Westmeath, it’s likely to be harder for one of the contenders to play themselves out of the last 12 than into it.

Given all that, we can probably take the last weekend in June as being the back nine on Masters Sunday. The preliminary quarter-final weekend is when the real stuff starts. For all the talk about the championship being squeezed till its pips squeak, that’s still the thick end of three months away as we sit here today. And there probably isn’t a sports-watcher in the land who couldn’t take a stab at, say, eight of the 12 teams who will be left by then.

And yet for all that, it is no stretch to claim that there hasn’t been a more open championship in years. In Kerry, Galway, Mayo and Dublin, there are four cast-iron contenders for Sam Maguire. No spoof, no thumb-on-the-scale – all four go into it confident they have the beating of the other three if and when they have to.

When is the last time that happened? You probably have to go back to 2005 when Kerry, Tyrone and Armagh had won the previous three All-Irelands between them. And even at that, it’s a bit of a reach – Dublin were in the mix back then and took Tyrone to a replay after an epic quarter-final but they were a distance removed from the big three.

So this is new. And that’s before we feed Derry and Tyrone into the equation. Neither of them probably good enough to win it out but both certainly annoying enough to nobble one of the others on a going day. Throw in Armagh, Monaghan, maybe even Cork at a push and there’s more texture and depth to the stew than we’ve had in a long time.

Off-Broadway, the Tailteann Cup has a crucial season ahead. Last year it had novelty and general buy-in going for it. As well as that, it had champions who revelled in their success. Westmeath’s year ended with the streets of Mullingar being lined to welcome them home, supporters delighting in every minute of it. For the competition to thrive, that sort of homecoming needs to be the norm.

It’s still at a delicate stage though. The upside of it being pure knockout last year was that any team who were half-hearted about the competition immediately left the stage to the rest of them. The potential downside of everyone being guaranteed three games is that they have to be played, whether or not everyone is into it. The last thing the Tailteann round-robin needs is teams obviously throwing their hat at the thing. One to keep an eye on.

But like so much else, that’s for down in the line. In the here and now, after nine long months, we finally have the championship upon us. Habemus Champo. A blessing on all who celebrate. Lean into it, absorb it, bathe in its warmth.

Most of all, don’t feel bad if it’s all a bit of a muddle, at least initially.

Remember, you are not alone.