The 2019 Leinster hurling round-robin ended with a bang. The final round matches featured four counties, champions Galway, Kilkenny, Wexford and Dublin all in with a chance of progressing to the provincial final and all but Kilkenny in danger of dropping out of the championship altogether.
The outcomes hopped around all evening. On the television, coverage of Wexford-Kilkenny was sporadically interrupted by a corner of the screen showing the latest turn of events from the Dublin-Galway match in Parnell Park.
Permutations continued to spin right up until Lee Chin landed the equaliser to force a draw with Kilkenny and Dublin struck late to beat Galway. As television cameras moved on to the field in Wexford Park, players were asking what had happened.
Wexford fatalism meant that some in the crowd believed the draw wouldn’t be enough for the team. So they booed the match officials on the basis that they must be to blame for the mistakenly assumed disappointment.
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Naturally it all gave way to euphoria when it was confirmed that the teams would meet again in the Leinster final.
Four championships on and the stakes are even higher this weekend back in Wexford when Kilkenny visit for the first time since that evening in 2019. This time the home supporters really will have cause to be unhappy if they lose out because that will be half their ticket for the Tier 2 McDonagh Cup next year.
The nightmare would be completed should Antrim beat Westmeath in Mullingar.
Earlier in the season, it could be said that overall, Leinster suffers from having a fall-off in quality because of its larger intake, but that it has provided more final-day movement than its more storied rival to the south.
“People forget that Leinster has provided all the last-day drama that Munster has been missing,” said Galway chair Paul Bellew last month reflecting on his county’s 15 years in the province. “I’m not boasting when I say that Galway has brought a lot to that.”
Largely true but as the season has unfolded, the balance between the provinces in entertainment value has tilted dramatically towards Munster, which has produced pyrotechnics in recent weeks and climaxes on Sunday with the All-Ireland four-in-a-row pursuit of Limerick threatened by an abrupt end when Cork visit.
This competitive readjustment has fired the imagination of the hurling public and Munster is poised to surpass the attendance figures for 2019, which were the best to date of the four round-robin years.
Going into this weekend the running total is 205,365 – 31,771 behind the record but with the crucial Limerick-Cork match to come as well as Tipperary’s last fixture against doomed Waterford in Thurles, where the home side still require a win to be certain of a Munster final place.
The Clare-Tipperary provincial final may well be fixed for Páirc Uí Chaoimh, scene of some memorable clashes between the counties in the 1990s and 2000s.
Although the TUS Gaelic Grounds are a more obvious halfway house, there is also the consideration that the redeveloped Cork stadium has yet to fill its capacity with a GAA fixture, as opposed to for soccer and rugby matches.
Of course, the universal truth of GAA attendances is well encapsulated by the comments of former director general Páraic Duffy at the launch of his 2009 annual report.
“We know, of course, that the attractiveness of any fixture depends hugely on the pairings, but we must nonetheless use all means at our disposal – throw-in times, venues, facilities, promotion – to make our games as appealing as possible.”
Croke Park officials have never hidden the fact that they are at the mercy of whatever the draws throw up when it comes to big championship matches. One of the motivations for the move to round-robin formats has been the desire for a wider range of counties to get the chance to play each other.
That is why this year’s Munster championship has been such a success. Although it has never happened that all five counties remain in contention, this year’s involvement of four teams with survival going down to the last day and the identity of the finalists not yet confirmed has created great excitement.
Limerick’s dropping back to the pack and Tipperary’s revival has meant that it’s hard to slip a bus ticket between the counties.
If you strip out Waterford’s results – extraordinarily, the county has maintained its wretched record in the round-robin, just one win in four years and 15 matches to date, despite being All-Ireland finalists and semi-finalists during the two Covid championships – there has been nothing between the others.
Five of the six fixtures not including Waterford have been played to date and Clare’s five-point defeat by Tipperary is the outlier. The other four ended in two draws and two one-point wins.
The traditional rivalries ensure that when Munster has a high level of competitiveness, gates will reflect that.
Leinster, however, face a major problem if Kilkenny and Galway are pulling away from Dublin and Wexford. Attendances have never been as strong as in Munster and should the unthinkable happen to Wexford and they have to depart the provincial championship for at least a year, the impact will be felt.
Wexford support is at the heart of what big attendances are attracted in Leinster. Six years ago, the record for the final was set as 60,032 for their match with Galway, and in 2019, 51,482 turned up for the county’s most recent provincial title win over Kilkenny.
Attendance at Leinster finals featuring Wexford is a little less than double the average of finals between other counties since Galway arrived in the province 14 years ago.
If Wexford do go down to the McDonagh Cup, it will be after a fair and square competition but the county will leave a huge void.
