I said from the start that Laverty was the man for Down. A Down football team is the strangest beast. They can be utterly awful. They can be deeply average. Then they can explode into world beaters out of nothing. Laverty’s hardest task with this Down team was in achieving critical mass, ie. to get them to some sort of staging point from which they could mount a run out of nowhere. He appears to have this now.
Down football is so mad that it’s not at all difficult to foresee a situation where they reach an All-Ireland final this year and then find themselves back in the Talgo Trains Cup next year.
Is the winner of the All-Ireland guaranteed entry to the All-Ireland for the following year? I’m not aware of anything in the rules that says they are.
It could be like when Liverpool won the Champions League and UEFA realised they’d made a boo boo with the rules where the winner didn’t get entry to the competition the following year.