Kerry's injuries and Cork's progress add new intrigue to Munster football championship
Micheál Clifford
LATER THIS YEAR, Return of the Provincial Football Championships, an epic tale which chronicles the triumph of heritage over heretics, will be coming to a screen near you.
Well, not so much an epic tale as a series of choreographed provincial secretary annual reports, and not so much a screen near you as the laptop of a GAA journalist in your vicinity.
Really, you should be thankful for small mercies.
Only a few years ago, a majority – just not a big enough one to affect change – voted to cut them free from the All-Ireland championship, but now there is every chance the tone of those reports will sing triumphantly from their digital pages.
Ulster, because it is the original and the best.
Connacht, because it can hail its championship to have displaced Ulster as the strongest and fairest of them all, given that half of its competing counties – more than anyone else – are now housed in Division 1.
Leinster, after a generation of authoritarian rule, has thrown off its shackles and embraced revolution with such relish that there is no place safe for the ruling classes, especially those that have been displaced and forced to graze the long acre from Aughrim to Portlaoise.
And Munster? Oh, that most maligned of entities, sneered at as a monopoly dressed up as a duopoly and hiding in plain sight in a hurling province, what card can it possibly play, never mind sing from?
How about a tale of the unexpected?
If things go as anticipated this weekend, for the first time in half a decade, Kerry and Cork will face off in the Munster final in little over a fortnight’s time.
Mind, they have to get there first.
After all, the last time Cork played Tipperary six years ago, the latter clinched their first provincial title in 85 years.
Much has changed since: Tipperary are a middle-of-the-table basement county, Cork are back as a top-tier one, and while Meath’s unexpected demise last weekend serves as a warning that newly acquired league status is not worth the paper wrapping it comes in, the bottom line is that Tipperary are no Westmeath.
But it is Kerry’s trip to Clare that has a whiff of some intrigue.
This week their fitness bulletin might as well have been issued by the press office for the local A&E, with Seanie O’Shea and Joe O’Connor returning from a training camp in Portugal reportedly wearing moon boots rather than flip-flops, which, added to longer-term injuries to Shane Ryan and Brian Ó Beaglaoich, and Jack O’Connor not expected to risk starting Gavin White, means that the All-Ireland champions could be missing as many as five of last season’s All-Star team for Saturday afternoon.
Ryan’s season-long absence is arguably the biggest miss, as his replacement Shane Murphy’s struggles to get the ball off the tee quickly were ruthlessly exposed by Donegal’s man-mountain middle eight in the league final.
Add in that O’Connor, O’Brien and O’Shea, all physically imposing figures in the middle-eight combat zone, could be missing, and the incentive for Paul Madden to set up his team with a bold and aggressive press hardly needs spelling out.
We are not saying that this game eventually will not roll as the world and its mother expects, but there is a fragility about the champions right now that was incomprehensible a month ago, when the narrative was that Kerry would get stronger as the season went deeper.
On top of that, there is a sense of a gap closing between Munster’s twin powers to the point even the most one-eyed of Kerry supporters will concede that Cork lost last year’s epic extra-time clash rather than the Kingdom actually deserving to win it.
That game, allied to three one-sided Kerry/Clare finals that on average attracted little over 12,000, lit the spark that ignited the Munster football championship in the off-season when the provincial council moved to seed its draw by league status, thereby ensuring that Kerry and Cork would be on opposite sides.
The anger in the fall-out – which saw the decision deferred for a year even though the subsequent draw obliged where resistance did not – missed the point that Munster’s decision was in sync with the decision to link league status to championship grading since 2023.
In short, instead of being the outlier, Munster’s decision should have been the norm, dictated by the GAA centrally that all provincial championships should be seeded on the basis of league status, thereby protecting a central tenet of its reformed two-tiered structure.
For example, Down, promoted from Division 3, would have played in the 2024 Sam Maguire but for Clare, who had lost to the Mourne men by 11 points in a final-round promotion decider, yet still usurped their place on the basis of beating Waterford, the league’s 32nd-ranked team, to reach that year’s Munster final.
That result alone merited Munster’s decision to seed their draw on league status, but no sooner had one problem been resolved, another emerged.
It may be only five years since Kerry and Cork last met in a Munster final, but should they do so in a fortnight’s time, the result will mean absolute zilch in terms of the All-Ireland series.
This day has been coming for a quarter of a century, ever since the introduction of the qualifiers, when neither team could deliver a knockout blow no matter how much they would have loved to.
There is a perception, one grounded on their respective records in the All-Ireland, that Kerry have always viewed Munster as a stepping stone, while Cork used to see it in olden times as a way to simply stop Kerry.
The fact that Cork’s last win was in a pandemic-sponsored knockout game, and filled them with such giddiness that they could not get grounded for Tipperary in the Munster final, did little to alter that perception.
If the introduction of the qualifiers diluted Cork’s sense of satisfaction of beating Kerry in Munster – the 2002, 2006 and 2009 defeats in Croke Park took care of that – football’s new way will water it down even more.
After all, should they meet in next month’s final, they will play for a cup the two counties will have already shared 123 times.
Should Cork win, there will be no denying their sense of joy – not having won it in 14 years will fuel that – but long term, how will that buzz be replicated when the victors and losers start out in the race that truly matters in the exact same place, playing at home in the first round of the All-Ireland series?
The irony is that while Munster Council sought a way to separate the pair of them, there would be, marginally, more at stake if they were on the same side of the draw, meaning that the team that failed to make the final would have to hit the road in the first round.
That will not matter right now and, given Kerry’s current fragility, the opportunity that Clare will scent this weekend has already long filled Cork’s nostrils.
But, in time, when Munster’s old firm takes up where it left off, how long can it be sustained as a ‘championship’ when it can only offer temporary custody of a piece of silver?
And the contagion of the diminishing relevance of the provincial championships will spread beyond Munster in time, where even rolling the rock up the Ulster hill will make the energy invested questionable.
The provincial councils know that, with recommendations in recent seasons for provincial winners to be rewarded by being fast-tracked deeper in the All-Ireland series.
But to do that, the provincials will have to return to a place that will skew the fairness of the All-Ireland championship.
And that’s a sequel no one really should have the stomach to watch.
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