Galway facing hard road to the Sam Maguire - what we learned from the GAA weekend

Irish Times

19-05-2025

Preliminary quarter-finals not the road Galway would want to take
Galway
are again facing the hard road towards Gaelic football's biggest prize.
Defeat last Saturday
has left the Tribesmen in a difficult predicament in their bid to top Group 4.
They entered last Saturday's round-robin opener against Dublin as one of the favourites to win the All-Ireland but the dial has moved now for Galway.
This is the third year of the current format (it will be changed again next year) and no team that has ended up in the preliminary quarter-finals has yet to win Sam Maguire. In fact, of the four preliminary quarter-final winners last year only Galway advanced beyond the quarter-final stages. In 2023, Monaghan were the only one of the four preliminary quarter-finalists to advance to the last eight. In short, you don't want to be in the prelims.
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The top four teams in each of the groups will advance directly to the quarter-finals. The eight teams in second and third places will be drawn to play each other in four preliminary quarter-finals.
The kicker is the format requires teams to play three weeks on the bounce – the last round of group games takes places on June 14th-15th and the preliminary quarter-finals are fixed for the following weekend, June 21st-22nd. The quarter-finals are then the weekend of June 28th-29th. Galway did negotiate a path to the All-Ireland final from the prelims last summer but ultimately they came up short in the decider. The more trapdoors you don't have to leap over, the better.
'Sure it's huge,' said Pádraic Joyce when asked about topping the group. 'If we can avoid them [preliminary quarter-finals], it'd be great. A game-less, it's definitely a big help. But, as of now, we'll settle for it now if we get one.
'This result just puts a little bit more pressure on us to get results in the next two games. Simple as that.'
Gordon Manning
Davy Fitzgerald goes too far with post-match comments
Antrim manager Davy Fitzgerald. Photograph: John McVitty/Inpho
The one thing
Davy Fitzgerald
can never be accused of is not speaking his mind. For better and sometimes for worse, the Clare man likes to say things as he sees them, and there was no holding back in his latest rant against match officials.
After his Antrim team suffered a 28-point hammering at the hands Galway at Pearse Stadium on Saturday, in the penultimate round of the Leinster hurling championship, Fitzgerald went as far as to say some match officials 'despise' him. It doesn't send across a good message.
And it couldn't have been any more contrasting to the reaction of Dublin hurling manager Niall Ó Ceallacháin when he was questioned about some of the referee decisions in their defeat to Kilkenny on Sunday, 5-19 to 3-21.
Fitzgerald's first complaint was that Declan McCloskey was sent off shortly before half-time; referee Thomas Gleeson was alerted to an off-the-ball incident between McCloskey and Galway's Tom Monaghan by linesman Johnny Murphy.
There was also another undisclosed matter Fitzgerald was unhappy about, which he also made known to match officials afterwards, and said he intends on taking up with Croke Park.
'If it's a sending off, it's a sending off by two, not by one,' said Fitzgerald. 'I had him [McCloskey] distraught at half-time. He said, 'I got a punch in the stomach. I reacted, but I got a punch in the stomach'. If you get a punch in the stomach ...
'It's not good enough. Would we have won the game? Definitely not. We weren't good enough. We're never going to win it ...'
On the other matter which Fitzgerald later raised with the match officials, he said: 'We've gone to the referee's room, and we've made him aware of it. We'll not be accepting it. I'm not going to say what it is, because I think it would be very unfair to do that right now.'
Fitzgerald then told RTÉ radio: 'It was Johnny Murphy that seen [the off-the-ball incident] and Johnny Murphy now wouldn't have any time for me anyway, that's out there ... Everybody knows that himself and one or two more of them, they actually despise me and that's fine, I can get over that. But don't take it out on the players, you have to see everything.'
Maybe this sort of reaction is expected from Fitzgerald, and maybe like some other things he says there is some deliberate overreaction.
But in some ways Ó Ceallacháin's reaction was even stronger, sending across a more powerful message.
In
a post-match interview on GAA+
, a couple of incidents were put to Ó Ceallacháin, namely where Tipperary referee Michael Kennedy awarded an advantage to Kilkenny which resulted in Billy Ryan's goal, whereas Dublin were denied a similar advantage when they appeared to be through on goal.
Ó Ceallacháin refused to take any issue: 'I won't be complaining about a referee today,' he said. 'I'm pretty sure what that decision was, but so be it. I make mistakes out there, so does everybody ...
'How I was brought up, you play the game, man to man, you shake hands after and that's it and there'll be no excuses or moaning from us'
Ó Ceallacháin was certainly a refreshing display of sportsmanship, and there might be a lesson in there for Fitzgerald too.
Black cards are still underused in hurling
It's not often you hear a losing manager come close to admitting his side got lucky with the referee but that's where we were, down in the tunnel in Semple Stadium on Sunday. Peter Queally had been asked about a possible penalty in the first half and had to clarify what the pressmen were talking about. 'For us or them?' he asked. 'For what?'
The incident in question was a pull back on Kevin Mahony on the stroke of half-time. It looked a very soft free, to be sure. But if it was being given as a free, it should surely have been a penalty, since Mahony was just inside the Tipp penalty area when it happened. Either way, Queally wasn't inclined to make an issue of it. 'We probably rode our luck ourselves a couple of times where there might have been black cards or penalties as well.'
He wasn't wrong there. Tipperary should have had two penalties and seen Waterford punished with at least one black card. In the first half, Andrew Ormond was clearly fouled at least once inside the Waterford area, if not by Ian Kenny then definitely by goalkeeper Billy Nolan.
In the second, Darragh McCarthy was in the clear when brought down by Kenny again, albeit he was without his hurley. If that was justification for a non-award of a black card penalty, it's a loophole that has to be closed.
Both Ormond and McCarthy were denied goalscoring opportunities by deliberate fouls. This was the reason the rule was brought in. Referees have to start applying it more consistently.
Malachy Clerkin
Limerick's scenic route for drive for five
Munster GAA Senior Hurling Championship Round 4, TUS Gaelic Grounds, Limerick 18/5/2025 Limerick vs Cork Limerick's Cian Lynch signs autographs for supporters after the game Mandatory Credit ©INPHO/Tom Maher
Limerick's show of strength at the weekend was the equivalent of police breaking up a party. All sorts of hopes and ambitions were nurtured in the absence of the era's outstanding team at its best. Cork thrived in the head-to-heads and Clare won the All-Ireland.
Having to process the failure to win five-in-a-row is acknowledged as challenging but what's the evidence?
Twice in hurling history, a county has achieved four successive All-Ireland titles: Cork in 1941-44 and Kilkenny 2006-09.
It is hard to gauge how in the Ireland of the Emergency with its wartime rationing of newsprint there was much hype about Cork's tilt at five in 1945 but they didn't get out of Munster and neighbours Tipperary won that year's All-Ireland.
Fifteen years ago, there was enormous hype around Kilkenny's prospects of finally nailing down a fifth successive title. They navigated Leinster but neighbours Tipperary won that year's Liam MacCarthy.
Last year was Limerick's turn. By then, the five-in-a-row had been achieved, by the Dublin footballers, 2015-20 but John Kiely's team looked hot on their heels and won a sixth Munster title in a row last year. Instead, they were defeated by Cork in the All-Ireland semi-final and their neighbours Clare won the All-Ireland.
In both cases, however, the Liam MacCarthy was regained 12 months later and there is at the moment little argument with the prospect of history repeating itself.
Seán Moran
Kildare's improvements good for hurling development
Last month, Denis Walsh
wrote a column entitled 'if hurling is good, why is it so small?'
. For all the love hurling receives as a national sport, vast swathes of the country don't play it at a high level and interest is relatively low.
It will be refreshing then for hurling's top brass to see Kildare, the seventh biggest county by population on the island, make significant improvements this year in the Joe McDonagh Cup. The Lilywhites only got promoted from the Christy Ring Cup last year and are now odds-on to make the final on June 8th after a stunning 11-point thrashing of Laois in Portlaoise on Sunday. The result means they can guarantee their place in the final with a win over Down in Newbridge next weekend, and may get through regardless thanks to a positive head-to-head record against Laois and Carlow.
All of a sudden, Kildare would be staring at an All-Ireland preliminary quarter-final and one match away from promotion to next year's Leinster Championship. While nobody would be expecting them to trouble Kilkenny and Galway next year in such a scenario, it is a significant leap for a non-hurling county and hugely encouraging for every team in the Christy Ring this year.
David Gorman