GAELIC GAMES:In the centenary of the intervarsity football competition, it's fitting that UCD's considerable contribution is noted, writes SEÁN MORAN

AT THE end of next week the GAA will observe a significant anniversary. The Sigerson Cup celebrates its centenary with the 2011 competition taking place in UCD. With this in mind, yesterday saw the launch of UCD and the Sigersonby Irial Glynn and edited by Paul Rouse, setting out the history of the third-level colleges' football championship with a particular focus on UCD and publishing memoirs from various players from the college going back to the 1940s.

It is the oldest surviving competition in Gaelic games apart from the senior inter-county championships – beating its hurling counterpart, the Fitzgibbon, which takes place this weekend in Waterford IT, by a year.

George Sigerson was born in 1836 in Tyrone of Scandinavian descent. He practised as a young doctor in post-famine Ireland but was best known for his writings, both in journalism and poetry, which he maintained on being appointed Professor of Biology in UCD.

Born in Ulster, he lived in Dublin with his family in Clare Street but had been educated in France and remained a Francophile for all of his life and was deputed along with fellow nationalist Timothy D Sullivan to present Marshal Patrice MacMahon, the French general and statesman whose forebears were from Clare and Limerick, with a ceremonial sword on behalf of the Irish people.

Despite a distinguished and varied life, he is now best remembered for the trophy he donated originally to be contested by the three constituent colleges of the National University of Ireland.

Without wanting to start a row down in Cork or over in Galway, it could be said that the central presence in the Sigerson over the years has been UCD. The Dublin college wasn’t the first to win the title and hasn’t troubled the roll of honour inscribers for 16 years but it remains comfortably ahead of the pack with 32 victories.

This is partly a reflection of its location in the capital city, as well as at the time much-resented academic regulations that forced students in particular disciplines to conclude their studies in Dublin, which has meant that it has attracted undergraduates from all over Ireland.

In fact with the singular exception of Antrim – presumably because of the presence of Queen’s University and later UUJ in Belfast – every single county has been represented on a UCD Sigerson-winning team at some stage over the past 100 years.

UCD has also reached higher than any of its rival institutions by winning back-to-back All-Ireland club titles in 1974 and ’75.

As has been seen in more recent times, success for third-level institutions in county championships isn’t always the most popular phenomenon in Gaelic games but for a period in the 1960s and ’70s UCD and St Vincent’s enacted a ferocious rivalry in Dublin, one that was translated to the inter-county stage by its protagonists Kevin Heffernan and Eugene McGee, who went from being a seminal influence in the college to taking Offaly to an All-Ireland title.

The claustrophobia of the initial three-team skirmishes have given way over the years with the incremental addition of Queen’s in the 1930s and Trinity in 1962, followed by various others, culminating in the major competition, lasting five or six weeks that now occupies such a major space in the GAA’s early-year calendar.

Gone are the days of a weekend tournament although the semi-finals – or next week, for the centenary the quarter-finals – are still played out over a Friday and Saturday.

Whereas it used to be possible to pick out embryonic inter-county careers in the annual Sigerson exchanges, these days that’s a less subtle task, as established players are sought by colleges to bolster their chances of winning.

Whereas there can be a tendency for the established colleges to bridle at the ease with which other institutions that aren't constrained by high entry requirements can recruit, it's interesting to note in UCD and the Sigersonthat there was plenty of controversy even in the pioneering days of the competition.

The book details how the captain of UCD’s 1928 intermediate team resigned in protest at the college fielding a player who wasn’t a member of the club.

So widespread did the practice of selecting non-students become that a summit meeting between the colleges was organised in 1930 which decided to ask the GAA to take over responsibility for the administration of the Sigerson and Fitzgibbon Cups.

Kerry’s legendary Dr Eamonn O’Sullivan, who managed the county to eight All-Irelands over five decades of intermittent involvement before Mick O’Dwyer emulated the feat (albeit in a shorter space of time) cut his teeth as a player-coach in the UCD of the 1920s.

He recalled the pitfalls of favouritism in a passage published for the first time in Weeshie Fogarty's excellent Dr Eamonn O'Sullivan – A Man Before His Time.

“I have a vivid recollection of the 1923 and ’24 Sigerson Cup games in UCC. I was then honoured as captain of what was regarded as a star-studded team of inter-county footballers, which included Dr Tom Pierce of Wexford [who had played in 1918 on the last of the county’s four-in-a-row All-Ireland teams].

“We were so conscious of our superiority that we regarded the opposition as of little consequence and we were well and truly rumbled by a good UCC team, which led us a merry dance in the final and sent us back to Dublin without the cup in a very chastened mood.”

So many names pop out in the cine reel of competitions past but one that probably flickers by largely unnoticed is Wicklow’s Tommy Murphy, member of the formidable UCD team of the late 1970s. I came across him in later life as player-coach of the 1990 Baltinglass team that took home the county’s first senior All-Ireland.

My favourite Sigerson memory happens to concern UCD in the year of their most recent success.

That 1996 tournament was hosted by UL and the semi-final between UCD and UCC was one of the best matches I’ve ever seen – allowing for the need to filter out the exaggerations of memory.

But it was a meeting of two top teams in pursuit of the big prize. UCC were the holders but after an at times brilliant display lost in extra-time having led by four with a minute left in normal time.

The match featured two future Footballers of the Year, Séamus Moynihan and Trevor Giles, plus a host of others, who would become better known in the years ahead, including Tyrone’s near-iconic Brian Dooher and Ciarán McManus, part of the Offaly team that flared briefly at the end of the decade and a fixture on Ireland’s international rules teams for nearly a decade.

Another century begins next week. Pay attention.