To see the league table as it finished in Division One this year, followed by last Sunday’s Galway-Mayo league final and soon to be followed by the undoubted game of the opening weekend of the All-Ireland championship – which is coming up this Sunday in Castlebar –, is to be reminded that the wheel keeps turning, no matter how slowly it may appear.
For the formative years of my GAA-watching life, the only chance Connacht and Ulster teams had of winning a game in the championship outside their province came along every three years – when the champions of both played each other in an All-Ireland semi-final.
In the decade before the emergence of the great Dublin and Kerry teams of the 1970s, Galway and Down had both won three titles each – but when the fall came, it came sharply and it hit hard.
The 1977 All-Ireland semi-final was seen as the apogee of the Dublin-Kerry rivalry – hardly anyone remembers that Joe Kernan got two goals for Armagh from midfield in the subsequent final (and even Joe told us what he thought that medal was worth at half-time in the 2002 final).
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Roscommon had their shot in 1980. Galway couldn’t beat 12-man Dublin in the 1983 final. Tyrone had a penalty to go nine points up on Kerry in the second half of the 1986 final – Kevin McCabe blasted it over and they ended up losing by eight.
Anthony Finnerty got one goal in the 1989 final, and missed another, as Mayo went down bravely to Cork. These were the failures that were remembered. Far more depressing were the semi-final defeats that were just seen as a matter of course, games that provincial champions never looked capable of winning, and promptly didn’t.
Win your little regional bauble, take a shot at the big boys, and go home – sometimes with pride maintained, other times with your tail between your legs, but always with your season finished.
Even when Kerry and Dublin went into decline in the 1980s, Cork and Meath stepped into the breach. Galway had a chance to beat Cork in the 1987 semi-final but John Fallon’s late point was cancelled out by a free from Seán O’Shea country by Larry Tompkins, and Galway were promptly hammered in the replay.
It took the return of Down, never a team short on confidence, to finally break the hegemony in 1991. Not alone did they become the first team from Connacht or Ulster to beat a Leinster or Munster team in the All-Ireland series since 1973, but they beat both Kerry and Meath on their way to winning the All-Ireland – an achievement which perhaps doesn’t get the credit it deserves when taken out of that context.
The whole period lasted 18 years, so it’s little more than a speed-bump in the entire history of the GAA, but when it had already lasted a decade by the time I started watching football, that inferiority complex is baked into one’s consciousness rather more stubbornly than one would think.
The first All-Ireland final I attended was 1991, and Ulster’s run of All-Ireland wins thereafter made Connacht’s isolation all the more acute. The results were never great, but 1993 was the undoubted low point, with the Galway minors and Mayo seniors losing to Cork on the same day by 19 and 20 points respectively.
Mayo’s win against Kerry in the 1996 semi-final was the first victory for a Connacht team over Leinster or Munster opposition since Galway beat Offaly in 1973. No one my age has forgotten how grim a time that was.
The presence of three Division One teams on the same side of the Connacht championship draw gives the Mayo/Roscommon game plenty of spice this weekend, but there are two other quarterfinals happening this week too.
Sligo had to put their celebrations on hold last weekend too, after they defeated Wicklow in the Division Four final. They should be good enough to beat London on Saturday afternoon, but Leitrim are travelling to New York, and that has its own challenges.
Leitrim were great at times in Division Four, and came within a whisker of beating Sligo in their last game of the league. Although promotion would have been sweet, a league final on a Saturday, followed by a transatlantic flight on Thursday, followed by a game the following Saturday would have been a fairly daunting schedule.
If Sligo and Leitrim both take care of the Exiles teams, they will meet each other in a Connacht semi-final, with a place in the Sam Maguire Cup up for grabs for the winner. The Tailteann Cup game between the sides last summer, and that final league game in Páirc Seán, were both riotous games, and the atmosphere for that semi-final will be electric ... if it comes to pass.
I had a pint with a member of the Leitrim back room team last November who reacted reasonably volcanically to the suggestion that they’d rather be in the Tailteann Cup this year than the Sam Maguire. Maybe he felt Leitrim were being talked down to – I can remember it happening to an entire province once upon a time. I actually thought my idea had a bit of merit, because Leitrim would start as possible winners of the Tailteann Cup given their recent good form, but it’s nevertheless every western team’s prerogative now to have national ambition. It wasn’t ever thus.
