Not my province

The 2009 All-Ireland hurling championship starts this weekend, and the marquee game is unquestionably the one in Thurles between Tipperary and Cork. The more interesting one though for those of us who obsess about how the GAA is run is in Portlaoise between Laois and Galway. Taking place at the time of writing, you don’t need to be Nostradamus – or even someone could really predict the future – to see this one is going to end badly for my wee nephew’s county. Still, the prospect of seeing Galway in the mainstream of the championship as opposed to standing outside demanding the mainstream divert itself into their path is a positive development.

This isn’t a cut at the Leinster championship. It is self-evident that the Leinster title lacks the allure of its Munser counterpart, but this isn’t because of an inherent lack of competitiveness – indeed, if lack of competition were a reason to denigrate a tournament, we wouldn’t be bothering with the Liam McCarthy Cup itself. It’s that for those of us willing to defend the centrality of the provincial championships in the All-Ireland series, the absence of Antrim and Galway was a glaring anomaly that needed to be addressed.

I’m unconvinced that any open draw system will make the hurling championship ‘work’. People talk of Champions League-style group stages, but we had that a few years ago in the qualifiers and it was not a success. Waterford whipped the mid-ranking teams then had their fate decided by their efforts against Clare (an away defeat) and Galway (a home win). However devalued the provincial championships might have become by the back door, and there is no point in pretending that there has been no devaluation, there is still a frission of tension generated by competing for trophies with a century-old pedigree. It would be hard to retain any of that in a round-robin format, and the amount of dead rubbers will reach Ireland-Davis-Cup-match proportions.

Of course, that’s not to say the provincial championships are inviolate. If they are so damaged that they can’t be fixed, it would be time to replace them. Even the Railway Cups had to put out of their misery. Hopefully the fix getting its first run today will prove sufficiently robust to keep these venerable old competitions on the road.

That Was The Season That Was 2008/9

It’s been the best of the seasons and the worst of seasons and back to the best again. Twice we embarked on runs where we looked invincible, the first showing a doughty never-say-die spirit in just about every game and the second saw us not even giving chances to teams as they were swept away by an avalanche of goals. In between, we had a run where you began to wonder would we ever win a game. Happy were the days when I thought schizophrenia was a condition of having a split personality as I could have described the Reds as being schizophrenic. As it is, we’ll have to settle for the much less pithy observation that it was like the Reds had a split personality.

The most remarkable thing about the Reds’ season was the grin smeared across Ray Houghton’s features on RTÉ mere moments after Benayoun’s last gasp winner against Fulham. Almost as remarkable is the way Robbie Keane has faded from the collective memory. Loath and all as I am to say ‘I told you so’, I did say we had “picked up a player past his peak, and paid top dollar for the privilege“. Keane hasn’t pulled up any trees since returning to White Hart Lane, where despite taking penalties he hasn’t managed many more goals per game than he did at Anfield. It’s nothing to be happy about, but it’s an immense relief. Having bragged about knowing he was a dud, now is the time to shamefacedly admit that I would have clung on to him, pathetically hoping that he would ‘come good’  in much the same manner I had hoped that Dean Saunders and Nigel Clough might come good (ask your grandparents). This would have been the easy way out for Rafa, so it is to his tremendous credit that he took the £3.5 million hit then rather than the £10-15 million one we’d be taking if we were trying to offload him now.

(Going off on a tangent, am I the only one irked by the self-conscious way in which players won’t celebrate when they score against their former club? I remember Gary Mac refused to do it when he scored the goal in 2001 that effectively relegated Coventry. You’re a professional, man. Either celebrate them all or celebrate none of them, these attempts at empathy with your former fans don’t wash. Okay, I’m the only one.)

Before choking on my own gloating, it should be noted that I got the other transfer saga of the summer of 2008 mostly wrong. Although you wouldn’t be able to tell from that link, any ruminations on the status of Gareth Barry were coloured by the notion that the time had come to move Xabi Alonso along. He’d gotten stale, and the £10 million figures being bandied around at a time when the football transfer market looked like it was about to tank with everything else in the global economy seemed like good business. With that, Alonso puts in what is probably his best season at Anfield and now figures of £20 million are being bandied around which looks like a terrible deal. Things could be worse: we might be linked with Barry again . . .

So it was the best / worst / best of seasons. Despite the lurking horror that was the Keane saga, and a flirtation with disaster in the Champions League that we will be mercifully spared in 2009/10, we really flew out of the blocks. Of all the cliches that people can point to about success, usually after the fact, two stand out: the notion that you can play badly and win, and putting together a championship winning run at a crucial stage of the season. We had both this year as the season started off with some tremendous comebacks in matches we probably should have lost – Middlesbrough, Wigan and most stirringly Man City, a game you never felt we were out of even when we were 2-0 down. Then there was the end to the season, which we finished like a train. Winning ten and drawing one of our last eleven games should have been enough to win the league. Certainly had you been told after the Middlesbrough defeat that we would only drop two points, including that astonishing win at Old Trafford, you’d have glanced at the league table and booked the title party in advance.

Galling as it is to admit, you have to congratulate the Mancs for matching us stride for stride. On several occasions we played ahead of them on the weekend and each time they held their nerve, most notably when finding themselves losing to Villa and Spurs. In the end, we gave ourselves too much of a mountain to climb and for that we must look to that shambolic mid-season funk when points were dropped like so much confetti. If you were looking for a single neat modernist reason for that bad run either side of Christmas, which included the depressing FA Cup exit at the Pit, it would be easy to look at Rafa’s rant at Demento. There’s no doubt it looked bad and got worse as time went on. But personally I prefer to look at the itch that we couldn’t scratch that was Robbie Keane.

I’m really labouring the point now, but when has that ever stopped me? It needs to be emphasised that this is nothing personal, that Keane conducted himself with tremendous dignity when his dream move – for that is what it was – went so spectacularly sour. It must have been utterly humiliating, and his refusal to bitch about his treatment was in stark contrast to the likes of Jermaine Pennant and only made you fret all the more as to whether we were doing the right thing in letting him go. But he was meant to be the final piece in the jigsaw, the 20-goal-a-season striker who was going to partner Torres and make us invincible. Instead his repeated failures to score heaped pressure not only on the player but on the club for failing to make that that swoop count. Man Utd could afford to pay big bucks for a relative mediocrity like Berbatov. Liverpool could not, and it hung around the club’s neck like an anchor.

Even now, it makes no sense that having sold a striker with a proven record Liverpool should start banging them in for fun. Yet Liverpool would soon be flattening teams with ruthless abandon. It helped that Kuyt started doing his share, and Benayoun – the most astonishingly improved player of the season – decided to make a habit of scoring goals at critical junctures. It was as if everyone felt liberated from having to justify the existence of Robbie Keane, not least the manager.

Rafa, Rafa, Rafa. On occasion in the past I have called for your head or given you less-than-fulsome support. I’m still not convinced it is all going to end in tears of joy, something that is really important should happen in 2010 now that Man Utd have drawn level with us in terms of titles won. Three years without a trophy and an unwanted record of being the only team to only lose two games and now in the Premier League. It’s not much of a CV. Yet once again, you’ve done just enough to earn a shot at redemption. Having masterminded the art of European football – failure to win the European Cup every year does not mean you don’t know what you are doing; it is, after all, a cup competition with all the vagaries inherent in that- there is tantalising evidence that you may have gotten English football licked at last. And most importantly, you’ve gotten under Alex Ferguson’s skin. Observe Demento’s recent best-of-friends act with Arsene Wenger and you’ll see a man who only likes you when he thinks he has you whipped. It may not be a sufficient condition for ultimate success but it’s a necessary one, and that represents progress from the season. Just no more Robbie Keanes – please.

Great-ish expectations

The footballers kick off their Sam Maguire campaign today, and no one will be under any illusions that Division Three third-placers and first round Tommy Murphy Cup exiters Waterford are about to power past NFL Division Two winners and Munster champions Cork to secure a tilt at National Football League winners and All-Ireland runners-up Kerry. Waterford’s goal for the season will be to have a run through the back door which should be eminently achievable given the quality of their league campaign – a kind draw would be nice though.

Update: a 14 point defeat probably represents a nudge towards fears rather than hopes. They would have been hoping to do better – unless they’ve put money on scoring a goal, in which case it’s party time!

Tremble in fear, rugby is . . . where?

Leinster’s tremendous win in Murrayfield yesterday will doubtless bring the usual bout of GAA hand-wringing about the threat of the oval ball game to the association, concerns exemplified by Tom McGurk’s self-satisfied observation aprés match that Leinster had players from “Carlow, Louth, Kildare, Wexford . . . and Dublin” (the last place was admittedly a good quip).

And it would be foolish to deny that Leinster’s success is going to be a tremendous boost to Irish rugby. This time last year, all the egg-chasers eggs had been put in the Munster basket. Now they have another team of winners to look to, and the Grand Slam to boot. As someone whose time and energy in Gaelic games is invested in the efforts of a high profile team – in fact, I’d go so far as to say that if I couldn’t anticipate a few big matches with Waterford during the summer, I wouldn’t be bothered much by the All-Ireland at all – it would be ill-advised to ridicule rugby’s grass roots efforts.

Obviously that’s the cue for some ridiculing of rugby’s grass roots efforts. For while I may be a bandwagon GAA supporter these days, I did at least play the games back in the Mesolithic, something that was essential to the development of any interest later on. Waterford should be fertile ground for the advance of rugby yet with the relegation of Waterpark, the title of being the nearest senior rugby club to the city is a close run thing between Midleton and County Carlow. When the best that Waterford has to offer is managing to lose a mere two of their fifteen games by seven points or less, the GAA needn’t be quaking in its boots.

Everyone is making money except the player(s)

Amidst the chorus of acclaim for Shane Lowry on his remarkable win in the Irish Open this weekend, it is most curious that none of the media outlets I checked (RTÉ, Indo, Irish Times, BBC, Grauniad) seemed to think there was anything outrageous that the runner-up should pick up the winner’s cheque while the winner got nothing. Many of them seemed to even think there was something faintly noble about it, Corinthian if you will. Maybe I didn’t look hard enough for the spluttering at such an iniquity.

Okay, the sarcasm detector has just exploded. But juxtapose the quasi-sympathy for Robert Rock on having to settle for the cheque when he wanted the trophy much more, with (say) the tut-tutting about the wage gap that accompanies any Ireland victory in the International Rules series. Spot the difference.

Prognostications and Procrastinations, 2009 edition

I don’t make mistakes. I make prophecies which immediately turn out to be wrong

Murray Walker

Trying to map out any knockout competition from beginning to end is like trying to make a jigsaw when you don’t know what the finished picture should look like. When predicting the recent World Snooker Championship (for those worried about the future of hurling, check out snooker; now that is what a sport on its knees looks like), any pundit who didn’t tip Ronnie O’Sullivan would have looked stupid. Yet they would have been the right ones.

Still, the logic employed in last year’s debacle – that it’s useful to have your thoughts down on figurative paper so you can’t be accused of rewriting history – still applies. And  aprés Boyo Redneckus, stupid things can be justified on the basis that they were ‘for the craic’. So without further ado, let’s get craicing.

Every county has plenty of variables attached to their pre-Championship case file, and none more so than Cork. The nuclear winter from which they have just emerged would have any other county on their knees, but no county can be more terrifying on the rebound than Cork. The vast resources they can deploy and the overweening arrogance that generates mean that they can go from a complete shambles to All-Ireland champions in the space of a few months, like they did in 1999. As with the aforementioned Ronnie O’Sullivan scenario though, you have to run with the idea that the form book dictates that Cork are in no position to make a sustained challenge. When beaten by Waterford in the last round of this year’s League, Denis Walsh retreated behind the lame excuse that Cork had not had enough games – lame because they had played four games with the complete panel, one fewer than they would have had in recent League campaigns. Some times you’ve gotta accept you’re not good enough, and with them haemorrhaging the players that they went to war for at an alarming rate, that looks the case for Cork this year.

It doesn’t help that their first match of the campaign is against the No 1 ranked challenger to Kilkenny’s crown. Having gone toe-to-toe with the Cats for 90 minutes in that ridiculously thrilling League final, Tipperary should be feeling optimistic about their prospects. Usually at this juncture it would be traditional to inject a note of caution in to such optimism, that as  a county that routinely congratulates itself on how doughty they are because they’ve been playing hurling since the days of Fionn Mac Cumhaill, Tipp will actually feel worse for the manner of their defeat because they went so near to puncturing Kilkenny’s veneer of invincibility but only ended up enhancing it. This would be superficially comforting, but from the perspective of the Munster championship it would be delusional. Tipperary looked awesome, and once the bitter taste of defeat has faded into memory Liam Sheedy won’t be slow in telling that to himself and the panel. Cork won’t be able to live with them.

Awaiting them in the semi-final are Clare. Last year’s surprise Championship package are this year’s surprise League package. They were staggeringly awful, relegated with a full round of games to go. Mike McNamara’s attack on the prospect of playing in Division 2 next year, quite apart from being grossly disrespectful to counties labouring away in the dungeons of hurling, was a pathetically transparent attempt to deflect attention away from their own failings. God be with the good old days when counties like Dublin and Waterford – yes, I can recall those days – would dutifully see-saw up and down the ranks and leave the permanent places for their betters. It’s understandable that the little matter of those McCarthy Cup’s would go to Clare heads, but with veterans of those days also dropping like flies, such attitudes are going to only make recovery harder. Last year I came not to praise Clare but to bury them, and they ended up burying Justin McCarthy. If at first you don’t succeed . . . Tipp to hammer Clare out the gate.

Which leaves the other half of the draw, the teams beaten in last year’s Munster championship by the team of whom I have just been so dismissive. Limerick will doubtless be telling themselves that the last team in their first year of being managed by Justin McCarthy, in spite of a modest League campaign, didn’t do too badly. And certainly Justin has a track record of giving teams an almighty early boost. Still, every person with an opinion on hurling in 2002 was in agreement that Waterford were a team of underachievers. The days of their hat-trick of Under-21 All-Ireland’s have faded sufficiently far into the distance that no one is suggesting that of Limerick. Indeed, reaching the All-Ireland final two years ago was seen as spectacular overachievement. There’s no evidence of spectacular improvement in the League and with Waterford’s track record we should be confident of victory.

Waterford’s recent track record, i.e. the League,  is spotty, to say the least. We beat the teams everyone else beat (Clare and Cork), beat / gave a good effort against the teams that beat everyone else (Kilkenny and Tipperary) and got beat by all the teams in the middle (Galway, Limerick and Dublin). Good luck trying to make sense of that mess. What makes it easier is the presence of Tipperary. If they really are as good as they look then we really shouldn’t have a hope against them in the Munster final. There, that’s them well and truly cursed. Roll on the summer!

Don’t let the back door hit you on the way out

As a committed advocate for the back door in the various GAA championships – there’s no doubt in my mind that weaker counties benefit from the knowledge that any effort put in to preparation for the summer won’t be flushed away after a single outing against one of the powers of the game – one has to confess that the various systems can throw up some farcical, and usually eminently foreseeable, situations.

Thus it is with this year’s Munster minor hurling championship. Having lost to Clare in the quarter-final, Waterford got to meet the losers of the other quarter final, in this case Limerick. Tonight Waterford defeated Limerick in the Gaelic Grounds by 4-8 to 1-14, and their reward for winning this repechage is a semi-final meeting with . . . Clare!

The Banner would be forgiven for wondering why they bothered. Forget about anecdotal suggestions that teams ‘learn more from defeat than victory’, it just doesn’t seem fair that Clare should beat Waterford only to have to play them again immediately in the same competition, this time with no safety net. All other things being equal there was a 50/50 chance of this happening. I don’t know which is worse – that the Munster Council didn’t spot the eventuality, or that they did and didn’t care.

Found: Lord Lucan, Shergar and a proper Waterford GAA site

Type waterford.gaa.ie into your address bar and you are one click away from such pearls as “MANAGERS RETURNED – John Kiely and Justin McCarthy ratified as Senior Football and Senior Hurling Managers” and “Accolades keep coming for Waterford Hurling Players – 3 Players named on Opel GPA Hurling Team of the Year“. With friends like that, who needs the Sindo?

Which makes the arrival on the scene of the too-cool-to-have-two-dots site that is waterfordgaa.ie such a shock. You could argue that not many people want to know that Alan Kissane will referee the match when Tramore host Ballygunner in Division 1 of the Under-16 hurling championship this Saturday at 3pm. But since the dawn of the GAA someone has to have written this information somewhere, and anyone with experience of software like that provided by WordPress will know that it should be a doddle to move it online. And it seems someone in authority has decided to do that. Well done to all concerned, long may it continue.

Pride in the jersey

People had questioned our integrity, our pride, our passion, but we produced a big passionate performance today

Brian O’Driscoll, commenting after Leinster’s 25-6 win over Munster in the ERC.

Brian O’Driscoll is one of the classiest acts knocking around in sport. Quite apart from being a genuinely world class player who applies himself with diligence to his craft, he is modest in victory and generous in defeat. When asked a number of years back after another quarter-final disappointment for Leinster who he would be cheering for in the rest of the tournament, he replied “Munster, of course!” and you could see he meant it – it never entered his head to think otherwise.

Which makes the quote above all the more significant. Even someone as mellow as O’Driscoll found the constant cuts at Leinster’s supposed lack of pride to be galling. Imagine if he had read  Leinster  being described as “those British chaps from Dublin“? Imagine then his thoughts as he went out to face that bould son of Erin, Lifeimi Mafi. Pain? In the words of another fake Irishman, the trick is not bothering about the pain.

I’m generally dismissive of the notion that players can be buoyed up by the words of their opponents (see: Richie Bennis), but that doesn’t mean you should tempt fate. Munster and their boosters have being doing this for years now, and it well and truly blew up in our collective faces yesterday. If nothing else, the embarrassment factor should mitigate against such behaviour.

Of course, some would argue that Waterford are in no position to be lecturing anyone on pompous jersey-kissing antics, to which I’d say that you are right. The embarrassment factor certainly applies when the men who would die for the jersey are as good as their word on the biggest occasion. But at least no one from Waterford has ever said or implied that pride in their county / province is unique to ourselves. When the Irishmen of Leinster take to the field against Cardiff or Leicester in the ERC final, it’ll be interesting how many of the proud Paddies will be rooting for them.