2024 All Ireland Hurling Championship

It doesn’t necessarily work like that though. A club like St Mullins wouldn’t do a whole lot at underage level in Carlow but always being through their players to senior level. It’s a bit like that with the county team in Carlow too. That’s the way it works in counties with Uber small picks, they focus on getting their players through to adult grades. Before Mouse Kavanagh and Chris Nolan, there was Johnny Nevin and Pat Cody and before that Paddy Quirke and Cyril Hughes and before that Moling Morrissey and Red Willie Walsh and Black Willie Walsh.

Success at underage level can be a signpost in a lot of counties but it is not a universal rule of thumb.

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Shhhhhhhsh you can’t mention throwing,it doesn’t exist

People don’t want to go to Croke Park for a match they know will have a poor crowd because Croke Park when it is mostly empty is a very empty experience, and occasion is what supporters crave. It’s also costly and inconvenient.

The McDonagh Cup suffers from the same crowd dynamic as the You Know When You’ve Been Tangoed Cup. People do not want to attend it.

Offaly people have flocked to Leinster and All-Ireland minor and under 20 finals in their droves over the last two years. Kilkenny or Wexford or Galway in Tullamore creates a similar dynamic. Tullamore is a perfect size for a provincial game. The atmosphere will be good, so people will want to go. A similar dynamic to what makes Ennis such an attractive place to watch hurling.

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Who hurled well for Wexford boys?

Any word on Liam Ryan? He’d be a massive loss against Clare. Could do with his size & physicality to match up against one of their ball winner type forwards.

It’s a very GAA delusion to think that anything is ever going to change in the Carlow/Westmeath/Laois etc dynamic of being way too good for anyone below them and never being good enough to win a Leinster championship. There is zero chance of it happening. None whatsoever. Best you can hope for is that over the next 100 years one of them might someday be competitive in a Leinster final.

The only thing that might ever work, like at club level, is amalgamation of some adjacent counties. But that’s challenging in practical terms, and completely impossible in ideological terms.

One way to get stadium’s full for matches full again is go back to straight knockout but we know that’s not going to happen

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There’s plenty of successful underage teams that haven’t amounted to anything in senior, the Limerick 3 in a row U21’s of 2000-02 the classic case in point, any number of Galway teams, arguably Waterford 2013/16 minor/U21 All Ireland winners as well and Tipperary U20’s of 2018/19.

Plenty of successful underage teams quickly made the jump though, Cork 95 minors, U21 of 97/98 were backboning a senior winning team in 1999. A lot of the Kilkenny U21 team of 1999 were in the first wave of Kilkenny All Ireland wins under Cody in 2000, 02 & 03. 6 or 7 of the Tipperary U21’s in 2010 were on senior team in 2010. Clare 3 in a row U21 of 2012, 13 & 14 were backboning a senior win in 2013. Limerick U21’s of 2015 and 2017 were winning Senior in 2018.

Offaly themselves had their All Ireland winning team of the 90’a backboned by the All Ireland minor winning teams of 1986, 87 and 89.

The mindset in Offaly has to be, this is a special crop that we were targeting to win a senior All Ireland.

It’s about getting jeopardy and a buzz. There are a hell of a lot of intangibles attached to that. Roscommon v Cavan today had jeopardy, and it turned to be a cracker of a game, but the crowds weren’t interested, probably because it’s not a traditional rivalry (the 1943 All-Ireland final notwithstanding) and mainly because supporters are ground down by defeats.

I recall a League semi-final between Roscommon and Cavan in Mullingar in 2002 however which had them packed in. Maybe we were a more simple people then though. Or maybe not.

I do think that a knockout round of 16 fixture between Roscommon and Cavan - minus the preceding defeats for both - would have attracted a better crowd than today’s game did.

Intangibles. Even within Munster hurling, Waterford are a sort of poor relation in terms of a creating a buzz in the current round robin system. Geography.

There are any amount examples of underage teams who backboned great senior teams and great underage teams who flopped at senior.

Often the crop who progress the best at senior don’t win an All-Ireland at minor level, sometimes they win nothing at underage.

As you say, there is no hard and fast rule, it’s unpredictable and is governed by any amount of factors.

Galway minor footballers 1994 are a great example of a team who didn’t win - nor did they win at under-21 - but they took senior by storm.

Dublin football 2011 minors are the backbone at senior still. I called it at the time that that team would be the senior backbone for a decade. They didn’t win that All-Ireland minor title, beaten by Tipp - and a fine Tipp team it was too. But where are that Tipp team now.

I don’t need to mention Laois.

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There are way too many matches now plus the football is fuckin awful to watch and I say that as a football fan first and foremost.From a Leitrim point of view we’d be as well off with straight KO as what’s going on these days.Spending huge money on management teams and s+c etc for the same end result.We could be putting that money into our clubs concentrating on the club championship underage etc.

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Mick O’Dwyer used to often make the point that an ideal trajectory for a gifted crop was to narrowly and unluckily lose a minor All Ireland Final. That gave them a taste of the big time and the big day, but the disappointment stopped them from losing the run of themselves and helped to make them battle hardened. A good chunk of his great Kerry team narrowly lost a minor final to Galway in 1970.

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I’d agree with that.

In football Dublin 2011, Tyrone 1997, a load of Mayo minor teams - 2005, 2008, 2009, Armagh 1992, Cork 1985/86.

In hurling Waterford 1992, Limerick 2013/14 and Clare 2010/11 and 1989 spring to mind.

The old back door system was the almost perfect compromise. You got a second chance, the provincial championship was still a big deal, the carrot of a back door run was a good one.

But it depended on a more equitable NFL system where naturally weaker teams got exposure to good teams, which would give them a good grounding to go at it on a given day in summer.

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Limerick lost a minor final to Kilkenny in 2014 that they could have won. Sean Finn, Barry Nash, Cian Lynch, Tom Morrissey, Peter Casey and Seamus Flanagan all played for Limerick that day.

What we desperately need in minor but rarely got thanks to producing too many quality young forwards, the majority or whom are now in Sydney or San Fran.

Regarding amalgamation, how could you suggest to offaly they need to amalgamate, they just won an all Ireland off their own steam. Something Dublin with all their funding and advantages have never done. Numbers are so tight in offaly it’s hard, but not impossible, to see them rise. But they at least should be helped, there’s few enough competitive hurling counties.

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Ah since the backdoor came in it been a disaster for the lower tier teams.We’re fucked now as there’s so much money involved in training county teams that there’s no way of reversing it.I said it before but I think the 90s was a golden age for football with so many teams winning championships.That wont happen again

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I don’t think it can be overstated what John Kiely has done for that group. I still recall the interview Kiely did with TG4 after Limerick beat Clare in Ennis in the 2015 Munster under 21 final. You could see the passion he had for it and how his eyes lit up after his team’s win. You knew there and then, that this guy had something, an ability to manage people, an ability to put in place the people who weren’t front men but had the technical skills to get the best out of that group in a hurling sense. Where would Limerick be now if John Kiely didn’t exist.

Where would Clare be now if they had a John Kiely figure, rather than Davy Fitzgerald, Donal and Gerry what’s their names and narky Brian Lohan doing his Mr. Bean act - and Lohan has been comfortably the best of them.

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Kinnerk was brought into the senior set up before Kiely. Kiely is just a front man. Effective and well liked but limerick would be a good not great team under him.

Leitrim were quite competitive in the backdoor era. They rarely took a hiding anyway. It won’t happen again because the GGA in it’s infinite wisdom has decided to turn the championships ultra-capitalist under the fake guise of socialism. But hey, it’s vibrant.

Kiely knits everything together. Were Kinnerk there but not Kiely, Limerick would be doing well to have one All-Ireland, never mind five.