Ciarán Murphy: A golden age dawns for that GAA permutation-lover in your life

If you were a hurling fan with a spare couple of minutes this week, then a glance through the various permutations in the Leinster and Munster senior hurling championships would have passed the time quite nicely.

Tipp are out, Kilkenny are going to be in the top three, Carlow and Antrim will have their only other rival to avoid relegation standing directly in front of them at 2pm on Sunday. After that, there’s an abundance of scenarios at play, each one, it seems, more complicated than the last.

But I feel it’s important to note at this stage that it’s not, strictly speaking, nuclear physics. There’s a mode of thought going around that it’s impossible to figure such things out, and therefore there’s no point in even trying. RTÉ television struggled badly in the last round of the football group stages last year — when Galway’s Shane Walsh and John Heslin of Westmeath were lining up last-minute frees almost simultaneously, with the entire fate of Group 2 up in the air, we were left to figure it out ourselves.

This week has been moderately challenging, but it’s not exactly trying to figure out how many bouts an Irish boxer has to win at an Olympic qualifier event to get through to Paris either

There is an easy answer to all this, and Malachy Clerkin of this parish is happy to give it to RTÉ for free — they merely need to hire a 13-year-old boy, for whom such calculations are exactly the sort of minutiae in which they revel. Those of us now working in sports journalism or TV are still emotionally that 13-year-old, but with greatly reduced brain function due to old age and/or decrepitude.

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[ Munster and Leinster hurling permutations: who needs to do what to qualify? ]

So this week has been moderately challenging, but it’s not exactly trying to figure out how many bouts an Irish boxer has to win at an Olympic qualifier event to get through to Paris either. (Those boxing events usually tend to be the most labyrinthine — other sporting events may rely as heavily as they do on continental quota distributions, host country places and those pesky Universality spots, but I haven’t seen them yet.)

It’s interesting the extent to which players and management should get caught up in this. There’s a line of thinking that suggests the players should be kept in the dark as much as possible. Don’t cloud their thinking with negative suggestions like what needs to happen if they lose for them to still progress — stay positive, and control the controllables. In this case, the only controllable is the final result.

I’m sure the Mayo footballers were aware in the week before their last game against Cork that a win or a draw would get them through as group winners. But should they have known a Cork win by three points or more would lose them their home preliminary quarter-final? Possibly not ... and maybe it also smacks of panic to start informing them with two minutes to go, after they’ve seen a six-point lead overturned, that not alone were their chances of winning the group evaporating into thin air, but that they were going to finish third if they didn’t shake themselves.

Players might crave clarity — but life is frustratingly short on clarity and so too are league tables where three teams out of four (or five, or six, in the case of the hurling this weekend) can qualify. The GAA’s almost pathological aversion to the “dead rubber” has ensured it is a golden age for the permutation-lover in your life.

What do you do? You tap it over the bar, and you secure the draw that ensures Limerick progress, and Cork go out of the championship

I got a text message this week from a fellow group-table peruser, who presented me with two separate but connected scenarios. In scenario one Limerick, fresh from their defeat to Cork in Páirc Uí Chaoimh, their ears still ringing from the words of pundits loudly proclaiming Cork to be likely All-Ireland winners if they can just get out of this Munster championship group, have a penalty with the last puck of the game against Waterford. They’re a point down.

What do you do? You tap it over the bar, and you secure the draw that ensures Limerick progress, and Cork go out of the championship. I think we can all agree that would be the correct course of action ... after all, if the penalty was to be saved, then Limerick would be out of the championship altogether. That’s a risk not worth taking.

Scenario two — it’s a drawn game when Limerick win a 65 that will be the last puck of the game. A draw suits them and it suits their direct opponent Waterford. A draw also eliminates their now arch-rival Cork. What do you do? I mentioned this possibility to a Cork man of my acquaintance and he said that Limerick would probably do the decent thing all right and make sure the ball went wide over the endline and not the sideline, but that it would nevertheless be a close-run thing.

This is all in jest, of course, and we are too often far more surprised than we ought to be when teams respect the integrity of the competition in which they’re playing, as Waterford did so memorably in the final round of the group games last year.

Cork are no longer masters of their destiny, but for every team in action this week the easiest permutation to remember is that a win gets them through. No one will be knocked out this weekend if they win their own game. That’s surely not too complicated. After that, Galway and Dublin must beware of the draw and everyone else sitting at home can settle back and enjoy the ride.