You know a critical head of steam has built up behind your point of view when you can talk patent nonsense and get away with it. So it was with Terence ‘Sambo’ McNaughton, the Antrim hurling manager, as he was uncritically quoted in the Star this week saying how the GAA was 125 years old and yet only seven counties have won the All-Ireland.
Perhaps Sambo was misquoted. More likely he was a bit overwrought after a second successive twenty-plus points shellacking, which would be understandable. Either way, it’s simply not true. Twelve counties (thirteen if you include London) have won the All-Ireland senior hurling championship. You might argue that wins for counties like Kerry, Laois and, uh, Waterford are so far back in the dim and distant as to be irrelevant, but the furthest back you have to go to encompass seven different All-Ireland winners is 1988, not 1888. That’s more different winners than have won the English soccer championship in that time. Using this measure, hurling is in rude good health.
The essence of the argument about Antrim’s misfortunes is that the system is uniquely loaded against them. Taken in isolation, this doesn’t stack up. While satisfying the provincial championships makes for a convoluted system, the bottom line is that everyone is guaranteed two championship matches. Antrim might have been able to claim in previous years that they weren’t getting a match against a top team and were completely unprepared when they did face one of them. That excuse is gone now. Having had a good hard match (to put it mildly) against Galway, they couldn’t have been any more ready for last Saturday’s match. Some times you’ve got to accept that you’re just not good enough.
If this all sounds a little mean spirited, you have to look at this rant in the context of the attitude to any shortcomings on Waterford’s part over the years. During the 1980’s the gap between Waterford and Antrim wasn’t that great. Antrim defeated us a few times during that decade and watched as Waterford zoomed past them into Division Three. Yet no one ever pointed out the breathtaking disparity between putting Waterford in at the Munster semi-final stage – semi-final, if the draw was kind to us – while Antrim got straight into the All-Ireland semi-final, of which the only material benefit to humanity was seeing Donal O’Grady deadpanningly predict that Antrim would win the Ulster championship. A single all-the-stars-in-the-heavens-aligned win over Cork in 1989 got Waterford a trip to the Munster final. A single win over Offaly in 1989 got Antrim a trip to the All-Ireland final, a result which earned Sambo an All Star. No disrespect to Sambo, but hurlers like Pat McGrath or Pat Curran never earned All Star awards simply because they were never able to strut their stuff on the telly. Yet no one ever expressed sympathy with Waterford’s station in life.
What is it that Sambo and co want? Before this latest complaint, I would have assumed the solution proposed by Niall Patterson in the interview with him in last Saturday’s programme, to wit the entry of Antrim and Galway into the Leinster championship, would have been acceptable to everyone. It would give them a competitive knockout match in a competition that would only require Galway to pull off one of their occasional thunderous victories over Kilkenny to suddenly become meaningful. If they lost in that they’d get a second chance, just like everyone else. It wouldn’t be very different to what happened this year but at least it would be neater. Reading Sambo’s latest lament though, it seems nothing other than a mulligan until Antrim sink the putt will do.
