Damian Stack: The Munster hurling championship is so good, let’s not risk ruining it
The very thing that’s made the Munster hurling championship so good this year would fatally be undermined if certain (well-meaning) people got their way
It was good wasn’t it? More than good, it was great. It was rock n’ roll. It was shock and awe. It was edge of your seat excitement pretty much from first to last.
If only we could bottle the Munster hurling championship it’d be the cure for a great many ills. Look at the crowds, look at the colour, people are voting with their feet. It’s magic. It’s special. It’s in danger of being destroyed by the very people most enthused by it.
The last point there might seem to come a little from left field, but bear with us a moment. It was hard not to feel sorry for this Cork team and their brilliant band of supporters as they exited the championship and the month of May not yet down.
What they brought to the party this year was some of the best hurling we’ve seen. Traditional Cork skill allied with a steel we’ve not often associated with them of late.
The Rebels are on the way back, so who wouldn’t want to see more of Pat Ryan’s Rebels? Who doesn’t want to see this side develop and grow further still?
And, yet, for all that, anybody advocating a change to the Munster and All Ireland championship structures on the basis of that, and of the Munster championship being so good, so strong, is sort of missing the wood for the trees.
To facilitate a fourth team to emerge from the Munster bear-pit – presumably matched by a fourth from Leinster with the Joe McDonagh Cup finalists losing their preliminary quarter-final berths – would at a stroke destroy the very thing that makes the Munster championship so compelling in the first place: that it’s so competitive, that there’s so much on the line.
Go back to Sunday and there were times when it looked like Tipperary, rather remarkably, might have been on the way out of the championship. A draw between Cork and Limerick in the Gaelic Grounds would have seen Liam Cahill’s men exit the competition given their unexpected defeat to Waterford. Knife-edge stuff, riveting, enthralling and absolutely certain to disappear if the structure is tinkered with.
It’s probably a form of Munster hurling exceptionalism that’s prompted this discussion in the first place, with an askance look at a Leinster championship which didn’t real heat up until the last couple of weekends.
The notion that Cork are out while Dublin remain in seems to jar with a lot of people, but consider that Dublin were very competitive against both Kilkenny and Galway and it’s potentially not as incongruous as you might imagine.
Besides if we’re going to persist with the provincial championships in hurling, there’s always going to be a certain amount of imbalance. Some years one province will be stronger than the other. In the preponderance of occasions that will be Munster, but maybe not always. If it’s the price you have to play for the last five weeks, it’s worth paying.
The only other option is to ditch the provincial championships entirely, to go with a more equitable, seeded group phase championship… but compared to what we have now, talk about a downgrade.
Only GAA folk could see something that’s working brilliantly well and start to think of reasons to ‘fix it’. Leave it be for jaysus sake.
Nothing more Munster than this salvage job
It was almost as if you could see the weight being lifted from them right there and then, in real-time. The two old-pros, the veterans, the standard-bearers for longer than they care to remember, finally, finally getting their hands on a bit of silverware again.
That the two of them went up to collect the cup together, well it was just right, wasn’t it? Brothers in arms. A Cork man and a Limerick man, the two poles of the Munster rugby, a forward and a back, restoring balance to the force. Munster’s first title in over a decade.
They bridged the gap, Peter O’Mahony and Keith Earls, from the old Munster to this new one. It’s been a lonely enough station at times for these two greats. Their early successes giving way to a period of retrenchment and of stagnation.
For the best years of their career, the peak seasons, their lot with Munster was that of nearly men. Perennial semi-finalists, always pipped at the post, one step forward, two steps back. Up until recently enough, it looked as though this season would follow a similar pattern.
We weren’t alone in despairing of Munster after their Champions Cup quarter-final exit against the Sharks in Durban, and that was just two months ago. Everything about it felt stale and tired. Same old Munster, crashing up against the glass ceiling all over again.
The contrast with how Leinster were going at the time was stark, and proved irresistible for us not to alight upon. Not only was the Reds’ European season on the rocks, it looked like their domestic campaign was spinning out of control, with qualification for next year’s Champions Cup in jeopardy. Now they stand as URC champions, making fools of all of us who questioned where they were going if not backwards.
To be fair there’s nothing more Munster than that. Backs to the wall, come from behind, up against the odds. As turnaround jobs go, we’re not sure we’ve ever seen better, in any code.
What Graham Rowntree and his backroom team have done – Denis Leamy playing a huge part by all accounts – has been simply wondrous, but we’re sure that it’s not as though they’ve changed things up dramatically.
More likely the foundations of what we’re seeing now were laid months in advance. It just maybe took the existential threat of missing out on the Champions Cup – practically the raison d’être for the province – to jump start their season again.
Even then one could rather dismiss their semi-final victory in Lansdowne Road on the basis that Leinster weren’t fully strength (less commented on was that neither were Munster).
What they did on Saturday afternoon Cape Town against the Stormers, however, cannot be ignored. Munster underdogs, in a hostile environment, and instead of being overwhelmed as they were eight weeks ago, they soared.
Not even the concession of a sloppy try early doors knocked them off their stride. Then in the second half when the Stormers bit back, Munster held firm, digging out a famous win.
The next generation – Jack Crowley, Calvin Nash, Gavin Coombes – showing some of that old-time religion to do as Munster used to do. Scratch that, they did as they do, and as they will again. Are Munster back? You know what, they might well be.
It’s everything everywhere all at once
We’ve not seen this year’s Oscar-winning best picture, Everything Everywhere All at Once, it just kind feels like we have after trying to follow the weekend’s sporting action. The glut of action across the two days was at times mind-boggling.
Having followed the Joe McDonagh Cup final all season long we wanted to check in on that… but Munster were playing in Cape Town at in and around the same time, so we were over and back between those two games.
As the tension ramped up in Dublin, we rather abandoned the rugby for a time, only coming back after Chris Nolan’s dramatic winner in Croke Park in the Joe Mac.
Then no sooner than we were getting our heads about Munster’s first league title in twelve years we were reminded that Derry were playing host to Monaghan in Celtic Park, the second half of which was just about to throw-in.
Honestly it didn’t feel like there was enough hours in the day to keep track of everything you wanted to keep track of. And that was just Saturday. On Sunday you had hurling action in both provinces, a Grand Prix in Monaco, and Roland Garros kicking off with some first round action in Paris.
You’ve probably heard of, or attempted, second screening, but with all that was going on, you’d have needed three or four screens (oh and we forgot the mention the final dad of the Premier League season) to keep on top of everything.
It was only at half-time of the match in the Gaelic Grounds between Cork and Limerick that the game between Dublin and Roscommon in Group 3 of the All Ireland football championship came anywhere near our radar.
The Rossies in front in Croke Park at the break, going on to hold on for a famous draw in the second half... and we didn't see a minute of it. Any other Sunday that would have been our go-to game. Just not this year.
Most weekends, to be fair, we’d be out covering a game so this wouldn’t be an issue, but it really does feel like the GAA isn’t quite getting bang for its buck with all of its fixtures from a promotional aspect.
Maybe in the grand scheme of things that doesn’t matter hugely, but something is getting lost along the way.
