Gaelic Football as a sport had endured a pretty tough summer before last weekend, but two incredible All-Ireland semi-finals showed that by and large, it’s just fine the way it is.
As a Mayo man, the wounds of Saturday’s defeat to Kerry are still a little raw but it’s not hard to look back at what happened at the Gaelic Grounds and in Croke Park six days earlier and think that it was a privilege to watch two of the best games of football I’ve seen in my lifetime.
Does that ease the pain? Absolutely not. But 160 odd minutes of Kerry v Mayo and another 70 between Donegal and Dublin on Sunday illustrated, for me at least, that despite plenty of doom and gloom attached to the big ball game in recent years, the sport of Gaelic Football is in pretty decent nick.
In the immediate aftermath of occasions like this it’s easy to get caught up in the excitement of two epic games and become a little bit short-sighted. Overall, has it been a good football championship? No, there were far too many one-sided games for that.
Hasn’t it been the case in recent years that the football championship doesn’t come alive until the quarter-finals on the August Bank Holiday weekend? Barring a few notable and honourable exceptions, it would be fair to say yes.
But is it really any wonder? The logic of knockout competitions dictates that the cream of the crop won’t meet until the latter stages and when they do, in the case of Gaelic Football, the rise in quality is noticeable while the fact that all games are played in a venue like Croke Park (barring last Saturday, of course) is a huge help.
There’s no doubt that the football championship has had to play second fiddle to its hurling counterpart in recent years and there’s good reason for that. While the football championship tends to spark into life in August and only sporadically before that, the provincial championships in hurling, particularly in Munster, are littered with great games, mostly because you have a limited number of teams not separated by a huge gulf in class competing against each other on a regular basis.
When that happens in football, you tend to get something similar. Take the last three years for instance. In that period, based on appearances in All-Ireland semi-finals and finals, the best four teams in the country have been Dublin, Kerry, Donegal and Mayo. Whenever they’ve gone head to head, they’ve served up some crackers.
A wounded Aidan O’Shea reacts to Mayo’s defeat to Kerry
The semi-finals at the weekend are obviously at the top of the pile but last year’s Dublin v Kerry epic is up there with them, the last three finals have all had their moments and the 2012 Dublin v Mayo semi-final was another enthralling affair. The infamous Donegal v Dublin semi-final in 2011 is the obvious exception but even that was fascinating in an odd way, while Mayo’s crushing of Donegal at the quarter-final stage last year was memorable for the seismic impact it had at the time.
It’s not just at the highest level that Gaelic Football produces the goods either. One of the most exciting games this year, for example, was Tipperary’s win over Laois in the qualifiers, a victory for a team very much on the up over one that has effectively had mid-table status in football circles for a number of years.
Basically, the point I’m making is very simple and has been made many times by people more qualified than me in the recent past; when teams of equal stature compete against each other Gaelic Football is a far better product and the weekend’s semi-finals made as strong a case for a tiered championship structure (one that exists at all levels of the GAA apart from at inter-county level) as there has been.
For all I’ve attempted to defend it, Gaelic Football isn’t perfect but show me a sport that is. Actually, on second thought, don’t, because there are fewer things I loath more than comparisons between different sports in an attempt to show that one is inferior to another; soccer usually occupying the inferior position in that meaningless debate.
But what Kerry, Mayo, Donegal and Dublin showed over the weekend is a reminder that at its peak, Gaelic Football is a wonderful game that exhibits qualities like skill, passion and commitment and is capable of providing what was, for my money at least, the highlight of the sporting year so far.
A few weeks back, Donal Óg Cusack – whose columns have been rightly and often lauded over the course of the summer – suggested some changes he’d make to the game of Gaelic Football to make it more entertaining to the viewer on the back of what admittedly had been some poor championship fare up to that point.
While his views were very interesting and all attempts to make the game better should be welcomed, I can’t help but wonder what the reaction would be like amongst the hurling community if a high-profile figure from the football world suggested making significant changes to the small ball game? I am in no way saying that there is anything wrong with the game of hurling or am I saying that Donal Óg was wrong to bring it up, but a few eyebrows would most definitely have been raised if it was the other way around.
It’s obviously easy to say it after what we’ve witnessed at the weekend but in my opinion, Gaelic Football doesn’t need to be turned into a 12 v 12 game (as Donal Óg suggested), it doesn’t need Dublin to be split into two and it doesn’t need to be altered in any radical manner; make it a more even contest across all levels and the chances are that the type of games we saw at the weekend would be a more regular occurrence.
And who wouldn’t want more of that?
