Football quarter-finalists laid bare and what else we learned from the GAA weekend

Irish Times

5 hours ago

The road
n
ot take
n
Spare a thought for the Louth bus driver. In an era where everything is analysed to the last grain of sand and nothing is left to chance, one wrong turn coming out of an unfamiliar town can leave the whole thing in a heap. And next thing you know, you're in Sligo when you're supposed to be in Ballybofey. Shit!
Instead of making the journey to
Donegal
all in one go on Sunday, Ger Brennan and his team stayed in Enniskillen on Saturday night. But somehow on Sunday, when it was time to go to the game, the bus headed southwest instead of northwest. What should have been an hour's drive took two hours and 20 minutes. Which is more or less what it would have taken from Louth had they slept in their own beds.
Donegal's Ciarán Thompson celebrates a goal during the preliminary quarter-final against Louth in Ballybofey. Photograph: Lorcan Doherty/Inpho
'A human error in our navigation,' explained Brennan afterwards, honourably refusing to throw anyone under the already tardy bus.
Louth
arrived at MacCumhaill Park at 3.15pm for a 4pm throw-in. They looked for a 15-minute delay but it was turned down. Whether or not it had any effect is impossible to say – they were only a point down at half-time so maybe not.
But you'd imagine it will be a while before the bus driver lives it down.
– Malachy Clerkin
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Red tur
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s gree
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for Dubli
n
On the very first weekend of the championship,
Clare
overturned a 12-point half-time deficit and ended up drawing their match with now Munster champions,
Cork
.
By the 57th minute, Cork's lead was still nine, 2-21 to 2-12, when Shane Barrett was sent off for a foul on David Reidy. Clare outscored their opponents 1-9 to 0-3 in the time remaining.
For many analysts, it was clear how the red card had undermined Cork. Darragh Fitzgibbon was forced to spend time dropping back from the forwards, leaving Clare frequently with a 6v4 advantage in defence and able to use that as a launch pad.
Chris Crummey's red card on Saturday came as early as the 16th minute, depriving
Dublin
not just the one-man penalty but the loss of an experienced player with the physique to compete with
Limerick
.
RTÉ and Irish Times analyst Joe Canning was critical of Limerick's decision to stick with their zonal defence when presented with an extra man but John Kiely defended the strategy.
Chris Crummey (6) leaves the field after being red carded during Saturday's quarter-final while Dublin manager Niall Ó Ceallacháin has words with Limerick's Gearóid Hegarty. Photograph: James Crombie/Inpho
'We used the extra man in a typical way that any team would, we had three-versus-two in the inside line, 99 per cent of teams would do something similar,' he said.
'We have no qualms about that – that's not a concern for me right now. Ultimately, we were just not 100 per cent sharp on the ball, we turned over balls we shouldn't have.'
There had been wins in Leinster this season for teams carrying a red card but neither Galway (versus Offaly), nor Wexford (against Antrim) were underdogs when Daithí Burke and Jack O'Connor respectively were sent off and they saw it out.
'It's not tactical,' said Dublin manager Niall Ó Ceallacháin afterwards. 'What it comes down to is the boys inside, how deep they dug, the hunger that was there, ground ball after ground ball. It looked like our boys wanted it more even with four on three or three on two at times in rucks on the ground.
'It's a complicated game; we've worked a lot on the small bit but in the cold light of day it's that stuff that the whole thing comes down to.'
– Seán Moran
Selectio
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headache for Joyce
Twice in the second half of Galway's win over
Down
, you could see the large frame of
Galway
sub-goalkeeper Connor Gleeson warming up. Páirc Esler is one of those fantastically tight provincial grounds, where the distance between the front row of the stand and the sideline of the pitch is barely enough for a man of Gleeson's size to do a lunge without inserting himself into the play. So he was impossible to miss.
Equally obvious was the fact that Galway's kickout was under immense pressure by now. Down had the aid of a stiff breeze, which was causing Conor Flaherty's kickouts to hang in the air, much as Down goalkeeper Ronan Burns's had in the first half. Down had cut a half-time margin of 10 points down to two and it was getting to crisis time for the visitors.
Galway's Connor Gleeson. Photograph: Ben Brady/Inpho
Would Pádraic Joyce really go so far as to hook Flaherty? Of course he would. The one thing nobody doubted was that if there is a manager in the country who would take the extreme measure of replacing his goalkeeper in the middle of a game purely on as a tactical move, Joyce would be top of everyone's list. He didn't, in the end – his midfield change of Peter Cooke for Paul Conroy solved the problem instead.
'We were looking at everything,' he said afterwards, when we asked him if Gleeson coming on was a possibility. 'We had given away three or four in a row again and just didn't go to our kickout routine that we should have when the pressure was on. We hit a few over the sideline. So yeah, disappointed with that side of it.'
Who starts against Meath this weekend? Joyce has a big call to make, so late in the season.
– Malachy Clerkin
Quarter-fi
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al co
n
u
n
drum
Jarlath Burns
has name-checked the All-Ireland hurling quarter-finals on his long snag list, although no solution has landed yet. Unlike the football quarter-finals, which have been two days of double-headers in Croke Park since their inception at the turn of the century, the hurling quarter-finals have been jerked around in recent years according to RTÉ's commitment to other sports and the GAA's desire to give the
Tailteann Cup
semi-finals a prime-time slot.
This year, the presence of Limerick and Tipperary in the quarter-finals meant the two most convenient venues for a double-header were ruled out, but the folly of splitting the games resulted in predictably disappointing crowds. The attendance on Saturday evening at the Gaelic Grounds was given as 15,404. For context, when Tipp and Galway met in the National League final at the same venue in 2017, the attendance was 16,089.
At the time that would have been seen as a reasonable crowd for a league final, no more than that. However, for a knockout game between two of the top six teams in the hurling championship, Saturday's crowd was pitiful. The Tipp crowd, who had deserted their team last summer, have come back in droves, but the Galway crowd, who have a long history of desertion, went to ground on Saturday and must have been outnumbered by eight to one.
Dublin goalkeeper Seán Brennan saves a late free during Saturday's quarter-final at Croke Park. Photograph: James Crombie/Inpho
Meanwhile, in Croke Park, it was the usual story when the Dublin hurlers share a double-bill with the footballers. Half a decent crowd turned up for the start, and a decent crowd rambled in before the game was over.
Hurling quarter-final double-bills haven't produced two good games on the same day since 2007, when Wexford beat Tipp and Kilkenny outlasted Galway in a cracker. That was one of the seasons when eight teams were obliged to line up in the quarter-finals.
In some years they haven't produced even one good game. It is by far the trickiest round of the hurling championship; two teams are recovering from a provincial final loss and maybe one of the other teams wasn't happy about finishing third in their province.
But there are so few hurling matches in June and July that the hurling quarter-finals simply must be restored to a Sunday afternoon double-header. Without that status, it will continue to suffer.
– Denis Walsh
Fixture gym
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astics
Even before the Louth team bus got lost on its way to Ballybofey on Sunday, Jack O'Connor had almost certainly started planning for Kerry's All-Ireland SFC quarter-final against
Armagh
. With Dublin and Galway having won, Kerry's fate appeared predetermined at that stage. And so it came to pass.
The repeat pairings stipulation meant Armagh could not play Dublin, Galway or Donegal in the last eight. That regulation also created a web within which several other fixtures that could not happen – Meath had a 50 per cent chance of playing Donegal but only a 25 per cent chance of playing Dublin. And so on. It added a layer of complexity that was, well, needless.
Kerry's David Clifford in action during the preliminary quarter-final against Cavan on Saturday. Photograph: James Lawlor/Inpho
Avoiding repeat pairings has been a staple of GAA draws even going back to the days before they were held at the crack of dawn on Monday mornings.
The desire to prevent a scenario where teams meet again is kind of odd. One of the great attractions of sport is rivalry, and the most basic way of creating a rivalry is for teams to play each other. Often.
Monday morning's draw has pitted Donegal against Monaghan. The sides met in the quarter-finals of the Ulster championship but they are permitted to meet again in the All-Ireland quarter-finals. However, Donegal were not allowed to play Armagh or Tyrone on the basis they played those teams at different stages of the championship. What would have been wrong with a Donegal v Armagh quarter-final?
Is there really any need for the GAA to continue a policy of trying to avoid repeat pairings? Perhaps they should encourage them.
– Gordon Manning