At times the GAA must dread the club season.
In recent years there was the embarrassing sequences of misbehaviour and indiscipline, outrageous attacks on referees and in the time of Covid, uninhibited breaking of public health rules during a pandemic – to the extent that Croke Park had to shut it all down before the reputational damage got worse.
There will ostensibly be warm feelings towards the season to date – while acknowledging that any coming weekend may contain unpleasant surprises for anxious administrators.
This year the action has been predominantly on the field and there have been enough shifts in fortune to keep everyone interested.
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Saturday night provided RTÉ with a cracking Leinster senior football quarter-final, showcasing the potential of new Dublin champions Cuala as well as the very impressive refurbishment of St Conleth’s Park in Newbridge which, as well as looking great, was delivered on time with minimal melodrama.
It was tough on Naas, who were invested with legitimately high hopes after the fall of Kilmacud Crokes as Dublin standard-bearers. They were undone again by the familiar inability to maximise output in periods of the contest when they were on top.
The football championship has opened up everywhere. All four provincial champions have been deposed, a clear-out that had only occurred once in the previous 15 seasons.
Leinster is likely to produce new champions but the likely successors in other provinces have a more seasoned look. Dr Crokes and Pádraig Pearses are odds-on in Munster and Connacht respectively.
Both have defeated the reigning provincial title holders and Pearses followed that up with a vibrant dismantling of Corofin, the only team to have won three All-Irelands in a row in either football or hurling.
It says something about the hold the Galway club have on the popular imagination that they were such runaway favourites to beat a team that had actually won Connacht more recently than they had.
Ulster is the only province without standout favourites but the first four of five clubs in the betting are all former winners: Kilcoo, Errigal Ciaran, Scotstown and Armagh’s Clan na Gael, responsible for a second disappointed Newbridge (Derry champions) over the weekend.
Hurling hasn’t been quite as revolutionary but Leinster is very open with only Offaly champions Kilcormac-Killoughey having previously won. It is a similar outlook in Munster with champions Ballygunner the only former winners.
Already the perennial assessment – almost a reproach – that there’s nothing to stop the Waterford champions winning the All-Ireland is probably chilling the blood down south-eastern parts.
Despite all the churn in football and the distinct possibility of new winners, All-Ireland club champions are in more recent times from a relatively shortlist of counties, no strangers to success at inter-county level.
Of the last 30 club winners, 22 come from counties that have won Sam Maguire during that period and only two have failed to add club to county All-Irelands, Meath and Tyrone. Of the counties to have won the Andy Merrigan in that time, just two were first-time winners, St Gall’s (Antrim) and St Brigid’s (Roscommon).
During those three decades, you could also add Clare’s Kilmurry-Ibrickane and Westmeath’s Garrycastle as All-Ireland finalists on one occasion each.
It’s not exactly the great, equal-opportunity economy that the championship threatened to be in its first couple of decades when clubs from Limerick (albeit, Thomond College), Laois (Portlaoise) and Wicklow (Baltinglass) won All-Irelands.
Like everything else in Gaelic games, the clubs are also affected by the split season. Schedules that can’t afford a feather’s counterweight walk a tightrope through the winter, helped by improved pitch technology but undermined by the old disrupter, multi-eligibility.
Encouraging dual players is a default sentiment in Gaelic games and even though the inter-county environment is now hostile to such shows of transcendent virtuosity, efforts have to be made to accommodate dual commitments.
Naas’s defeat at the weekend removed the last club capable of a senior football-hurling double but there are other grades, capable of interference.
On Tuesday night, Leinster Council were given a headache when the already deferred football quarter-final between Castletown and St Loman’s had to be postponed because of fog.
About two-thirds of the Castletown players also hurl with the club’s other half, Liam Mellows, who are between fixtures in the junior provincial championship. Accommodating the last of the quarter-finals will be difficult unless the clubs can agree another midweek date.
Whatever about dual clubs and their potentially associated problems, competitions control also has to factor in ‘permission players,’ who if playing for a single-code club may opt to hurl or play football with another. Either way they can crop up, requiring accommodation if both of their teams have progressed.
Options are not extensive. Even the availability of floodlights isn’t as obvious a solution as it appears because hurling requires a stronger floodlight, 500 lux, as opposed to football, which can get by with 350 lux.
If O’Moore Park in Portlaoise becomes unavailable for a hurling fixture, there is (according to Leinster Council) no other ground in the province outside of Croke Park that can provide an alternative venue.
The headquarters stadium is again being used for the Leinster finals this year but will the football be able to wash through the system before November 30th when the matches are pencilled in to be played.
Semi-finals are scheduled for the weekend after next, which is just a week before the announced final date. The hurling can’t be postponed because All-Ireland semi-finals are due to be played before Christmas.
When things are going well the club championships, for all their challenges, are great entertainment but things can get complicated in the era of the split season.
e: sean.moran@irishtimes.com
