All the talk for the last four days has been about novelty, about two All-Ireland final pairings in hurling and football that give people something genuinely new to look forward to.
It is the ultimate mark of respect, but let’s face it – in 2023, a Dublin-Kerry football final, preceded by a Limerick-Kilkenny final seven days before, was a little light on novelty. In the 10 years that ended with that pair of finals, the four teams involved had hoovered up nine of the football titles, and eight in hurling.
Cork haven’t won an All-Ireland for 19 years, Armagh for 22 years and Galway for 23 years. Clare are only waiting 11 years since their last All-Ireland, but to be paired with Cork again serves as a reminder of just how badly things needed to be freshened up in 2013. Back then, we had gone through a whole series of Kilkenny-Tipperary finals and semi-finals, and yet that summer saw Limerick win Munster, Dublin win Leinster and two other teams entirely contest the All-Ireland final.
This year hasn’t quite seen that level of upheaval, given the fact that if a few moments had gone slightly differently in both semi-finals we could well have had another Kilkenny-Limerick final. But I think it’s fair to say that most of us are glad of the change.
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So there is novelty for the public, but there is also a huge amount of familiarity between the teams. This will be the first time that both All-Ireland final pairings will be rematches from earlier in the season.
In this Sunday’s hurling final it is the team that has beaten Limerick twice this year up against the team that has lost to Limerick twice this year, as has been much commented upon over the last week and a half. But it feels important to note that the team that lost to Limerick twice have also already beaten this weekend’s opposition. You could take a racing line through Limerick if you wanted, but the game between the two teams from earlier this season seems like a more pertinent match to focus on.
This is what happens when you have a team as thoroughly dominant as Limerick have been over the last six years. Even in their absence, people are wont to use them to frame the All-Ireland final. It’s only natural. One suspects Limerick will start next year as favourites to win the All-Ireland, regardless of what happens on Sunday.
The situation in football is slightly different. Dublin have been coming back to the pack in the last few years, and retirements over the course of the next few months may further hurt their chances for next year. And the other half of many people’s presumptive “Big Two” at the start of the year is an even more difficult team to pin down.
Éamonn Fitzmaurice is one of the shrewdest minds in the game, and any RTÉ broadcast that features him is immeasurably improved. But when he wrote in Monday’s Irish Examiner that “there are a collection of All-Irelands that we group in the ‘one that got away’ category. There is now a 2024 addition to that particular compilation”, I had to disagree.
Kerry played poorly all year, and lost to the first good team they met. I fail to see how this year could possibly be described as one that got away. Maybe any year when you have David Clifford and you fail to just waterski your way to an All-Ireland off the sweat of his brow counts as an opportunity missed? Kerry certainly played as if that was in large part their plan this year.
It’s one thing to have repeat finals between teams that are constantly improving and moving the game forward, but Dublin and Kerry were doing neither of those things this year.
By the same token, that’s not to say that Galway or Armagh aren’t relieved they’re not facing either of them on Sunday week. There is no massive imbalance in history or winning experience. Finals are different, and Dublin in particular would have been able to lean on the experienced players in their squad. The roll of honour suggests an imbalance, but Galway are not in All-Ireland finals enough to scare Armagh with their historical pedigree, almost all of which has been compiled in the previous century.
There was little or nothing we didn’t already know about Limerick, Kilkenny, Dublin or Kerry at this stage last year. This isn’t always a bad thing, as familiarity with players and teams can breed strong feelings, one way or the other. But there is a freshness about the four teams looking ahead to their big day this year.
Cork did the hard work of eliminating Limerick from this year’s championship, but the suspicion must remain that they’ve only cleared the way for Clare to drink their milkshake. There’s no power imbalance here either.
None of the four counties involved will be looking knowingly at the other crowd losing the run of themselves with the security and calmness of habitual winners. That may make the build-up hard to handle for the players, but it is a beautiful thing to see from the outside.
Whoever takes home the silverware over the next 10 days, it’ll be hard to imagine any situation that doesn’t involve the very best kind of mass hysteria.
