All-Ireland Football Championship 2019 Preview

Dublin are odds-on favourites to win their fifth title in a row, an achievement that would make them the greatest GAA team of all time, football or hurling. They would be the only team to achieve that feat, and that therefore makes them the best. Of course it does.

Of course, they would not be a sensible investment. An odd-on price is never a sensible bet in multi-horse field, even if there are fewer horses running in the race than you might prefer.

Your correspondent is inclined to take League form with a pinch of salt, but what was interesting about Dublin in the League wasn’t so much the results as the sudden loss of appetite. Dublin in their pomp revelled in burying teams. This new, steady-as-she-goes approach ill-suits them. Seeing them like this is like calling into the local and seeing the local Champion Pintman not only drinking tay, but drinking it out of a cup and saucer. Has the world changed, or is he only doing the dog?

There is an opinion abroad that Dublin could get broadsided in Leinster. Delicious though this prospect would be, it’s impossible to make a case for any other Leinster team doing anything other than falling valiantly. In recent years, it’s only Westmeath that have really put it up to the Dubs, but they’ve never had the sort of playing resources that Meath or Kildare or even Offaly once enjoyed. The pick of the three wouldn’t keep it kicked out to Dublin now.

A shrewd eye should be kept on Kerry. There was much made of how immature Kerry looked against Mayo in the League final, but you can grow faster in football years than you can in actual years. Seán O’Shea will only be a few months older come the summer than he was in that League final, but he’ll be carrying scar tissue that will stand to him in bigger battles to come.

How long it takes him and others to toughen up will determine how quickly it takes Kerry to win their next All-Ireland. It is not impossible it may happen sooner than we would have thought when the final whistle blew in that League Final.

The hardest challenge to the Dublin imperium will come from the North, as usual. The Ulster Championship is easily the most competitive, and perhaps it’s because of this that a dumping into the qualifiers seems to knock Ulster teams less out of their stride than others.

The leading hounds of Ulster are Monaghan, Tyrone and Donegal. Monaghan had a stinker of a league, and did well not to get relegated in the end. This, after beating Dublin in the first game and being hailed by some critics as the second best team in Ireland.

The reason why Monaghan had such a poor League isn’t obvious. But it’s difficult to believe that so valiant a team as we’ve known Monaghan to be in recent years have just suddenly thrown in the towel. The suspicion here is that it would be unwise to dismiss the Farney challenge without further intelligence.

Donegal and Tyrone have been praised for their league performances, and praise has been grudgingly given to those counties in recent years. It’s interesting that the praise heaped on the counties is at odds with the rumours drifting from the camps, about players not happy about playing for their particular managers and other stories of internal strife and woe.

Try though I might, I can’t force myself to believe that Tyrone have found a Philosopher’s Stone to take them one further than last year’s All-Ireland Final loss where, in truth, they never really competed. You have the players or you don’t, and Tyrone, for all Mickey Harte’s in-game tactical ability, seem one or two players short.

Donegal are blessed with the best player in the country, Michael Murphy, and will always be a threat while that man can pull on a jersey and answer Tír Chonnail’s dread war cry. The more help he has the greater Donegal’s chance becomes.

Galway were the darlings of the League last year, only to again disappoint in Dublin in the summertime. That Galway reign as kings of Connacht is beyond dispute and, should they face Mayo in a Connacht semi-final as many expect, they will enjoy home advantage at the butt of the broad Atlantic, also known as Stáid an Phiarsaigh, Bóthar na Trá. Kevin Comer’s absence continues, which has to be a source of worry.

Again, the word on the wind is that Comer is one of these players who is more than just another member of the team – he is seen, subconsciously at least, as the avatar of the Galway football tradition, and as such he cannot be replaced.

For all that, Galway are spoiled with talent, and learning all the time. Last year there were rumours of difficulty in integrating the Corofin players into the county team. That was noted, and the two teams have been bonding since the start of the year. Almost violently so if rumours of a January challenge match are to be believed, but then, people do like to tell stories.

Your correspondent’s friends insist to him that being afraid of Galway is like being afraid of the dark – an immature, childish terror, not borne out by scientific evidence. Right. Tell that to me again when we’re stuck in traffic for two hours on the Grattan Road after Galway pox a seventy-eighth minute winner over Mayo and we’re all thinking things can’t get any worse, only to see great Cthulhu himself rise up out of Galway Bay, release an eldritch roar, and make a beeline for the Róisín Dubh, foul tentacles thrashing the sea into foam around him. I’ll remember to laugh.

You may notice that there is one contender that remains unnamed. The reality is that Mayo have bounced back so high from taking the road from Newbridge to Nowhere last year that any attempt at rational thought on the part of any Mayo man, woman or child in the matter of football is now quite out of the question.

In her beautiful sonnet, Love is Not All, poet Edna St Vincent Millay remarks that, in a difficult hour, she may be tempted to sell your love for peace, or the memory of this night for food. Your correspondent would sell a damn sight more than that to see Diarmuid O’Connor lift Sam in the Hogan Stand on the first of September, and is unable to sensibly contemplate even the notion of it without either fainting or going insane.

For that reason then, I predict that not only will Dublin not win five-in-a-row, they won’t even reach the final. The final will be a repeat of the 2000 final, a draw between Kerry and Galway, and I’m danged if I know who’ll win the replay.

If anybody’s in Castlebar on the night of September 2nd, by the way, I’ll either be in Byrne’s, McHale’s, or above in a tree somewhere, looing. Up Mayo.

The Championship: Still Crazy After All These Years

Drop the Provincial Championships, they said. Be grand, they said. Not fair on the lower division teams, they said. We’ll do away with history and tradition and pride and this ineffable thing called “glory,” all for something we saw on the telly. Be grand, they said.

One of the many gifts of the Championship that it is both the same and completely different, year after year. Every Championship starts with some unhappy counties getting their ears boxed in late May or early June, and the why-oh-why columns in the papers. Then the summer progresses and the hay is brought home and that year’s Championship takes on its shape until you suddenly realise that heatwaves and holidays are all well and good, but in Ireland, it’s the Championship that makes the summer.

There are twelve teams left in the 2013 Championship now, a Championship that we were told was pretty much exclusive to the teams in Division 1 of the League. Of those twelve teams, six are from Division 1, two from Division 2, three from Division 3 and the team that came dead last in Division 4 is still sitting in the light.

The three Division 3 teams are the most interesting. It’s unlikely that either Cavan, Meath or Monaghan will win their first All-Ireland in fifty-one years, fourteen years or ever, but they could stop some big dog from winning it, and that’s a pretty sweet feeling too.

If anything, Monaghan are the most disadvantaged, because while they beat Donegal yesterday in Clones, Monaghan did not destroy them. The curse of the back door is that the underdog’s win is cheapened by the favourite’s second chance. If Donegal can get by Laois – and it’s by no means a given – their momentum is back, while Monaghan may psychologically settle for their first Anglo-Celt Cup in twenty-five years. Human nature is like that.

One thing that is certain, however, is that the aura of invincibility is now gone from the Champions. Donegal may regroup - Jimmy McGuinness may be able to talk them into seeing this as all part of a Great Plan, but the rest of the country will have noted the weaknesses for later exploitation. Back-to-back All-Irelands have only been won twice in twenty-seven years, and there’s a reason for that. Once it gets to the elimination games, the Championship is a high-wire act lined with landmines. Not only is one slip fatal, but you can do nothing wrong and stil get blown to hell. It’s a lot like Life in that respect.

Next weekend sees four games of lip-smacking appeal. Cavan will be overwhelming favourites against London but they must guard against complacency. Mayo were able to beat London with their D game, but Mayo’s D game is better than Cavan’s. Everyone in Cavan thinks they’re going back to Croke Park. That way misery lies, and the London fairytale gets one more chapter.

Donegal will play Laois, where the great puzzle is if Donegal can get over the shock in six days to play a team who are a little like Monaghan – old soldiers who have been in the trenches for a long time, looking for one last day out.

Meath play Tyrone in an intriguing game. Meath’s glory days are a decade and more ago, but the way the wired it up to Dublin in the Leinster final, playing to their tradition and not giving a damn, woke up echoes of Meath teams past. Tyrone remain a mystery. God only knows what’ll happen in this one.

And then, Galway play Cork. The first thing to note is that this is a fixture nightmare. The Cork hurlers are scheduled to play Kilkenny and the Galway hurlers will play Clare in Thurles on the same day that Galway and Cork are scheduled to meet in football, a double-header with Meath and Tyrone.

Could there be a triple-header in Thurles? Could Semple stadium hold it? Could you move the two hurling games and the Cork and Galway football to Croker, and Meath and Tyrone for a novel day out in Thurles? Could Meath and Tyrone be played in Clones? Questions, questions, that the GAA will have to sort out quickly.

As for the game itself, it’s a chin-scratcher. The sound of rent garments was general in Galway city and county after Mayo hammered the heron-chokers in Salthill back in May. Huffing and puffing against Tipperary and Waterford did little to dispel that impression.

And then Galway go out and paste Armagh, and are now strengthened by the addition of Conor Counihan to their cause. That’s a terribly cruel thing to write but Counihan’s team selection seems mysterious in the extreme, and there’s a case to be made that if Cork had got their selection right they would have hammered Kerry in Killarney.

No less astute an observer than Dara Ó Cinnéide remarked in the Examiner before St Patrick’s Day that, while the country concentrated on Dublin and Donegal, Cork were ideally placed to come up on the rail and surprise them when they weren’t looking. That’s still the case, but only if Cork pick the right team. If they do, Galway come to the end of the line, but will have a lot to build on for next year. If not, Galway march on and Connacht will have two representatives alive come Bank Holiday Monday.

And what of the provincial champions, watching next weekend’s tussles and wondering what will be in store when they next pull on their boots? Monaghan in the North, still savouring the sweet taste of victory. Mayo in the west, playing at their peak but always aware that for them, the Championship only lasts seventy minutes on the third Sunday in September. In the east, a Dublin team that are like a young man on his first provisional driving license – fantastic with the foot down on the open road, not so hot when he has to put it in reverse and park the thing. And down south, Kerry. Always Kerry. Watching, waiting, and making plans. They’re in the mix too.

Aodhan Ó Ríordáin and the Urban-Rural Divide

The fact that Aodhan Ó Ríordáin is pro-choice in the matter of abortion is only news to people for whom it’s news that ducks have feathers. What else would he be? What else could he be?

Equally, the fact that Ó Ríordáin chooses to be discrete – until last summer, of course – about how he shares this information isn’t really news either. He is an Irish politician, after all. There may be some of that vocation to whom you could feed a five pound bag of nails and not expect five pounds of corkscrews to be egested after due time, but my goodness there wouldn’t be many.

What is much more jaw-dropping is Ó Ríordáin’s attitude to people from County Monaghan and, presumably, most of that place outside Dublin that the general population think of as “Ireland.” He’s not gone on them, to say the least.

Ó Ríordáin’s wife is from Monaghan and it seems that he finds going up to visit the Farney folk something of a trial. Ó Ríordáin remarks, in the course of his gloriously indiscreet interview in yesterday's Sunday Independent, that “I go up there and sometimes I just scratch my head at some of the . . . just the . . .”

Words fail him at the horrors he’s seen. You can imagine him holding his nose walking down the streets of Castleblaney or Clones, pinkie extended, alternately horrified at the milieu to which he’s exiled yet still able to marvel at the local yokels walking upright and what not.

Not that he’ll be going back anytime soon, of course. Someone from the cast of Tallaghtfornia has a better chance of solving Fermet's Last Theorem than Ó Ríordáin has of seeing the next dawn should he choose to enjoy a Saturday night pint in the Busted Sofa in Clones or anywhere like it. In fact, the thing most likely to keep him intact in Monaghan may be a belief among the Farneymen that it’s Ó Ríordáin’s wife’s people who should have first claim on satisfaction. But the silver-tongued socialist might be better off not chancing it, just in case.

Not that a Monaghan exile would be any great sacrifice to him, judging by his comments. Ó Ríordáin seems to be a prime specimen of that peculiar type of Dubliner for whom the existence of some sort of rural rump anywhere outside of Dublin is something of a mystery.

The continent exists for weekends away and wine-tasting, Great Britain for setting a certain tone and standard, you know, and the United States for Macy’s department store. But for Ó Ríordáin and his tribe, that strange place north, south and west of the M50 is like one of those medieval maps that show nothing but great empty spaces, speckled here and there with bendy dragons, fierce and fire-breathing.

It’s a peculiar trait of the Dubliner to be insular even amongst his own. This is true across all social divides. A fellow from Finglas could live his whole life and never visit Cabra, even though it’s the next parish to him. A native of Terenure might get lost in neighbouring Templeogue, and have to turn his jacket inside out in order to break the spell and come safely home again.

But the insularity between urban (meaning Dublin, by the way – try telling a Dubliner that you are not a culchie because you’re Cork, say, and Cork is also a city, and see how far it gets you) and rural Ireland is more pronounced among the middle than the working class. Not that the working class particularly care for culchies, of course, but loyalty to the GAA and some of the tropes of republicanism cause a certain nostalgia when they hear of places like Aughrim, Kilmichael or the lonely Banna Strand.

For the middle classes though, Ó Ríordáin’s attitude is not at all uncommon. They are charmed to see Munster rugby players wearing the emerald green of Erin but Marian is always more likely to ring Brian O’Driscoll’s pater before a game than Paul O’Connell’s. And of course, if there were no culchies, who would populate the Garda Síochána, and hold the line marked by the river Liffey?

But the notion of being in the actual culchie heartland, far away from Fade Street or the Dundrum Town Centre – well, it doesn’t bear thinking about. “I just scratch my head,” as Aodhan Ó Ríordáin so eloquently put it.