With melancholic timing, the starting point for this week is the 2010 All-Ireland football final – the swansong broadcast of the late Micheál Ó Muircheartaigh, who died on Tuesday.
On the field, Cork’s victory was the last time that a team would win the All-Ireland having lost a match along the way. Conor Counihan’s side were unique in one respect: they hadn’t already won Sam Maguire through what we used to call “the front door”.
That was the formula. Take a team with a recent All-Ireland and when they lost in the provincial championship, bring them on an extended tour through the qualifiers, making adjustments as you go and then, present at the later stages of the championship with a team tempered in the fire of defeat.
[ Michael Murphy: Derry back from the brink and will believe they can beat KerryOpens in new window ]
Two experts in this speciality are still around and facing each other in the coming weekend’s quarter-finals. Mickey Harte generated two of his three All-Irelands with Tyrone by repurposing a team defeated in the Ulster championship.
Jack O’Connor has a similar record with Kerry. Two of his four All-Irelands came after his teams were beaten by Cork in the Munster championship. On both occasions, they got to avenge themselves on their neighbours in Croke Park.
This time, the two managers are coming from very different perspectives. Kerry haven’t been beaten all championship but haven’t been tested much either. Harte’s Derry had a sparkling league and were tested thereafter to the point that one more failure, last weekend in Castlebar, and their season was over.
They won on penalties and will on Sunday test the theory that what doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger.
During the first decade of the All-Ireland qualifiers, football’s prototype second-chance structure, six of the first 10 winners came through that outside track, having lost in their respective provincial championships.
They had all won an All-Ireland already along the conventional route of winning their provinces: Galway in 1998, Tyrone in 2003 and Kerry in 2004.
It wasn’t hard to see why the template worked. Teams that became stale and needed a shake-up could get an accurate reading on what was needed to improve.
Here is O’Connor before the 2009 All-Ireland with Cork, reflecting on how Kerry rehabilitated after losing to the same opponents in the Munster semi-final.
“If you look back at the last 10 minutes of the replay, we were almost looking in at the game, mentally making notes of what adjustments we would need to try to strengthen the team, and we set about doing that in the qualifiers. This game is now the opportunity to try it all out.”
Even in the pits of despair this season, Harte reached back into his experiences with Tyrone to find some reassurance.
“Sometimes you have to go the road you’re sent as fate would have it,” he said after losing to Galway. “I’ve been down a few of those roads before and we managed rightly.”
They did indeed. Having lost a replayed Ulster final to Armagh in 2005, his team were trailing pre-boom Dublin at half-time in the drawn All-Ireland quarter-final. He made a number of inspired switches: Conor Gormley to centre back, Seán Cavanagh to wing forward, Enda McGinley to centrefield and that configuration went on to win the replay and the All-Ireland.
Redeploying personnel was a recurring feature of these rebuilds. A year later, after a previous replay defeat by Cork, O’Connor turned Kieran Donaghy from an average centrefielder into a wrecking-ball full forward, an All-Ireland winner and Footballer of the Year. After the 2009 Cork defeat, he talked Mike McCarthy out of retirement and placed him at centre back.
Back in 2001, year one of the qualifiers, Galway’s John O’Mahony shuffled his deck after losing to Roscommon in the Connacht semi-final: Tomás Mannion from suffocating corner back to bulwark centre back, Michael Donnellan, given space to roam at centrefield. The tweaks were so effective they regained Sam.
These rebounds were also frequently built on a transformative display after which a team that had already won an All-Ireland, realised they could do so again.
Galway 23 years ago, met Armagh, who would succeed them a year later, in a qualifier and won by a last-minute point from Paul Clancy.
Tyrone’s matches with Dublin redirected their season. In fact, Dublin were regularly cast in that role of the whetting stone against which blunt teams sharpened their edges: Tyrone again in 2008, Kerry a year later.
These are different times but Harte made a vocation out of thwarting Kerry in the 2000s, defeating them on the way to three All-Irelands.
In 2012, after a heavy defeat in Killarney, Harte was applauded on to the team bus by magnanimous Kerry supporters.
Wonder if they’ll be doing that again this weekend?
Micheál Ó Muircheartaigh died on Tuesday, having been a soundtrack to so many Sundays for so many people. The fluency of his interweaving narratives, often in two languages and somehow always reaching a conclusion in sync with match commentary, was as well-known as it was highly accomplished.
All I would add to the tributes being paid is that he was a nice man, an interesting conversationalist who never spoke badly of others and very kind and supportive to young GAA journalists, which I gratefully remember from half a lifetime ago.
One of his most memorable commentaries, at the end of the 1994 Connacht final, referred to “generations of Leitrim people looking down from the veranda of Heaven” after the county had won its first title in 67 years.
[ Micheál Ó Muircheartaigh - in his own wordsOpens in new window ]
He now joins them but his spirit will always be a welcome presence on level seven.
