Forget what's happened so far — the real All-Ireland Football Championship begins now
The old line about Augusta is that the Masters does not truly begin until the back nine on Sunday. Everything before it is scene-setting and noise. A leaderboard with no permanence.Then comes Amen Corner and grown men start drowning in their own heartbeat. If Gaelic football ever needed an equivalent, this is it.Thirty-seven championship matches have been played. Four provincial champions have been crowned. Westmeath and Armagh remain unbeaten. Cavan and Meath have yet to win. And none of it may matter.Because this is the point where the championship stops introducing itself and starts asking questions.The modern system has created something curious: survival matters more than status. The teams arriving this weekend unbeaten are not necessarily in a better place than those staggering in bruised and doubted. In fact, some may be worse off.Westmeath have won five from five. Leinster champions. History makers. Their reward? A trip to Galway that feels less like a prize and more like a trapdoor.Lose there — perfectly possible, perfectly understandable — and suddenly all that momentum becomes memory. They will have seven days to convince themselves they are still rising when instinct tells them they have just started falling.That is the cruelty of this structure. The winners carry pressure. The losers carry possibility.Look at Round 2B. Kerry are there. The All-Ireland champions. Dublin are there, too, humiliated and wounded but not dead. Roscommon, Connacht champions, suddenly reduced to fighting for oxygen. Meath or Derry joining them, each carrying enough recent history to believe one good fortnight changes everything.Win this weekend - and Kerry at Kildare, Dublin at Cavan and Roscommon at Monaghan - will feel they can - means those teams will not feel exhausted. They will feel alive. That is different.The four sides who lose in 2A must spend a week repairing themselves psychologically. The four winners in 2B arrive with the emotional velocity sport so often obeys. Confidence is not a statistic. It is a force. Teams either carry it or chase it. And history says the late runners are dangerous.Kerry proved it last year. Meath beat them in the group stages and people spoke as if the empire had finally collapsed. Instead, they won the championship taking one Ulster scalp after the next — Cavan, Armagh, Tyrone, Donegal — before lifting Sam again.Go back further to 2009 and the route was even uglier. Longford nearly caught them. Sligo nearly caught them. Antrim stayed close enough to make Kerry uncomfortable. Then came Dublin at Croke Park and all the clever predictions dissolved by half-time.Dublin arrived as favourites. Kerry arrived with scar tissue. Scar tissue wins more often than people think. The game became a massacre. Seventeen points in the end. Then Meath. Then Cork. Then Sam Maguire. That is why writing off counties in June is usually an exercise in vanity.In 2010 Down came from nowhere to reach an All-Ireland final. Tyrone won Sam in 2008 after an early Ulster defeat. Championship football is littered with teams who looked broken until suddenly they looked inevitable.Because momentum in Gaelic football behaves differently to league form or provincial success. It arrives late. It arrives violently. And once it gathers pace it becomes difficult to interrupt.So yes, Westmeath and Armagh deserve enormous credit. Unbeaten seasons should mean something.But the system needs tweaked to reward provincial winners with home ties as all four provincial winners have to go on the road this weekend.That’s why, in some ways, the Championship - in earnest - is only about to begin. Kerry know this. Dublin know this. Donegal know this.The smart money still settles on four names — Kerry, Donegal, Armagh and Galway — because they possess the one quality every championship eventually demands: the ability to survive the moment when certainty disappears.That moment is here now. Amen Corner.And from this point on, nobody cares how elegantly you walked to the tee. Only who survives the water.Click here to sign up to our sport newsletter, bringing you the top stories and biggest headlines from Ireland and beyond
