For a change, next Sunday’s All-Ireland club finals bring a high degree of novelty. The championship has been through many changes, particularly in more recent years, but the trend towards serial success has at least temporarily come to a halt.
Pre-pandemic, Corofin became in 2020 the first club to win three successive All-Irelands and, but for the pandemic, Ballyhale Shamrocks might well have emulated them in the abandoned year that followed, in 2021.
This weekend, for the first time in 32 years, all four clubs are appearing at this stage for the first time. You could argue that both the Cuala footballers and Na Fianna hurlers are simply following in the footsteps of the “other code” within their clubs.
The Dalkey team won back-to-back All-Ireland hurling titles in 2017 and 2018, whereas Na Fianna were football finalists in 2000. To hold that against the current teams would be nit-picking, as they will be representing the historically less-fashionable side of their respective houses.
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Cuala’s defeat of Kilmacud in the county final was their first football title, just as Na Fianna, who skinned the same opponents with a dying-seconds goal in their final, were collecting only a second Dublin hurling championship.
Their respective opponents in Croke Park, Errigal Ciarán and Sarsfields, are uncomplicatedly first-timers. Errigal are actually Tyrone’s first contestants in the senior club final, maybe surprisingly given their success at intercounty level in the past two decades as well as the strike rate of their junior and intermediate clubs – 11 finals and four titles – at national level in the same time frame.
Sarsfields didn’t even emerge from Cork as champions, having lost comprehensively to Imokilly in the final. But their opponents’ status as a divisional side – barred from provincial competition – cleared the way for them to contest Munster.
Their performances stunned observers, especially in the final when they burned off regular champions Ballygunner in the early stages and maintained the heat as the match progressed. A Cork side had reached the Munster final just once in the previous 14 years and you had to go back a further seven seasons for the once-dominant county’s most recent title, Newtownshandrum in 2009.
It had been eight seasons since a club from the county had even won a single match in Munster.
Theirs has been a story of triumph in adversity and not just on the field. In 2023, Storm Babet brought floods that destroyed their pitch in Riverstown. For a year they had to couch-surf in neighbouring clubs, their facilities restored only a few months ago.
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Should Cuala win on Sunday, they will become only the second club after St Finbarr’s to have lifted both All-Ireland trophies. Their success has been seen as the gauge of Dublin GAA’s reach into the southside suburbs in the 50 years since Kevin Heffernan revived the county as an All-Ireland force. On the eve of a first four-in-a-row in 2018, former captain and manager Tony Hanahoe made the point.
“Now that Dublin have arrived and are there, there are two or three generations who won’t ever understand how far down we had gone at that stage. For one who remembers these things, the rise in the interest in the game and the success rate has been astounding.
“The greatest example of that is Cuala. If, 30 or 40 years ago, you had attempted to convince me that there would be an All-Ireland winning club from out around Killiney, I’d have laughed in your face.”
Na Fianna are based in more traditional territory but both come into the “super club” category, with 3,000 or more members – a reflection on how hard it is to establish a club in Dublin, which fosters outsize catchments.
The county could become the third to win both club All-Irelands in the same year, following Cork in 1973 (Glen Rovers and Nemo Rangers) and 1979 (Blackrock and Nemo) and Galway in 2006 (Salthill and Portumna).
Pride of place in the history of dual All-Ireland challenges has to go, however, to Cork’s St Finbarr’s, who in 1981 reached both finals, beating Walterstown in the football but losing the hurling to Ballyhale.
It is now five years since the traditional St Patrick’s Day date went by the board for the club finals. For all the grumbling about how this calendar switch to January has undermined attendances, there were signs that the public were losing interest in the regular March fixture.
Fewer than 18,000 attended in the last year of the Patrick’s Day finals and 12 months previously – not helped by arctic weather and Ireland’s rugby Grand Slam decider with England being on television at the same time – just 15,000 made their way down Jones’s Road.
It was a far cry from peak crowds at the turn of the century. In 1999 for the Crossmaglen v Ballina and St Joseph’s Doora-Barefield v Rathnure double bill, a record 40,106 turned up. But with the exception of 2004′s Caltra v An Gaeltacht and Newtownshandrum v Dunloy pairing, which drew 38,500, attendances settled in the low 30,000s.
The new split season has created pressures for top intercounty players, obliged to go around the clock if their clubs do well. Christmas has always been affected in successful clubs, making a calendar year attractive but, in the consensus view, impractical.
On the Irish Independent sports podcast, Birr’s Michael Verney – for all of us, that most dignifying combination of All-Ireland finalist and reporter – gave the hardship argument short shrift.
“You hear, isn’t it terrible that players are missing out on Christmas. I can tell you that the players who have to – in inverted commas – ‘sacrifice’ Christmas are the envy of every other club in the country. That is a fact.”
By Sunday evening, that process will intensify as two of the weekend’s clubs create history.
