I sometimes wonder about famous athletes who talk about the relief they feel when they go on holiday where no one knows them. They speak with such joy about being able to go about their daily business, free from prying eyes. And I’m sure it is a relief. For a few days.
But is it all that unlikely to think that after a few days of anonymity, they might start ... missing all that attention? Similarly, I can’t help but feel that hurling may have been happy to keep its head down for the first part of the year, but that patience is starting to run thin.
It was one thing for everyone to be calling their league utterly irrelevant for the last few years, but when the alternative was league football, hurling folk were still able to command people’s eyeballs. An irrelevant game of hurling was still a game of hurling, after all.
This spring, even with a partially reanimated hurling league, they’ve been getting the cold shoulder from the watching public. Everyone’s been two-point arcing, 4v3-ing, soloing and going, and all manner of things besides. Hurling, meanwhile, is being treated like James Maddison on a two-week break in the Catskills. “Are you ... somebody?”
Of course, there’s the public, and then there’s the hurling public. And they’ve been going nowhere. Some 65,000 people went through the gates at Cork’s three home league games, at least one of which was played in a downpour. And now news of a sell-out at Páirc Uí Chaoimh for the league finals on Sunday week, with a resurgent Tipp making the first of two trips in a month to Cork to take on the home team. Maybe hurling is impervious to the whims of the chattering classes.
There’s also Offaly against Waterford preceding it in the Division 1B final, which has led to questions being asked as to whether the finals could have been played as stand-alone fixtures.
Once again, the Gael’s pathological hatred for the sell-out rears its ugly head. The idea that somewhere there could be a potential customer incapable of buying a ticket for a game, anywhere, at any time, for a game that isn’t an All-Ireland final, seems to drive people crazy. If these games were played in Thurles, they would not be a sell-out. Páirc Úi Chaoimh is a beautiful, modern stadium. Is it too much to hope that we’d play the odd game in there?
In any case, the games will proceed before a capacity crowd on the same weekend the Gaelic football championship starts, but I don’t think it will lack for eyeballs. Tipperary finished top of the Division 1A table, with five wins and a sole defeat to Limerick away to blot their copybook.
Watching Cork score 10 goals in the last two rounds of the league, away to the All-Ireland champions Clare and at home to Galway last weekend, was a fairly potent show of strength. But it is March. And the less seriously Limerick take the league (as they most assuredly did this year), the more jeopardy there is for those counties, like Tipperary and Cork, who appeared to target early season success.
If Limerick were to go out and hammer the newly crowned league champions Tipperary in the Gaelic Grounds two weeks after this final, on April 20th, then not alone will a league title be devalued, it will be derided as a waste of energy. If Tipp win on Sunday week and then lose at the end of the month to Cork in the Páirc in the one that matters, they could even have a league title and two consecutive championship defeats in a row under their belt. That’s a fairly up and down month ... mostly down, as far as their public would be concerned.
I’m not entirely sure that these large attendances at Cork games constitute them running away with themselves. What we’re seeing is an astonishing show of enthusiasm in the county for their hurling team. I don’t see cockiness, or even confidence, that they can win the All-Ireland title – Limerick are too good for that. But it’s an indication of how desperately the GAA as a whole needs a high-performing Cork. That county and Tipp might be acutely aware their season will not be defined by a league title, but they might also feel they’d no option but to go for it anyway.
Offaly’s appearance in the 1B final is the good news story of the whole league. No team was pulling their punches in 1B, and Offaly came from behind Dublin and a few others in the preseason standings to be promoted.
They showed last Saturday against Waterford that they’re capable of mixing it with Munster opposition. And it’s hard to escape the impression watching them that even though many of their underage stars weren’t even born when Johnny Dooley retired from intercounty hurling, a little bit of attitude appears to be an intergenerational personality trait. What’s more, they are more than capable of bringing their public along with them, too. That’s what makes Sunday week’s double-header so appetising.
It might have been a novel feeling to have been put in the shade for a month or two by the big ball, but hurling will not be taking that lying down. In fact, they might just be ready for their close-up.
