And just like that, the football season pierces the clouds and whistles in for landing. After a championship that had all the drama of a librarian quietly dusting the shelves, suddenly it feels like we’ve moved a book and triggered one of those turnaround walls. Welcome to a room where the music is blaring and the joint is jumping and you better have your wits about you or you’ll be bounced out on your ass.
Eight teams left — three Ulster, two Leinster, two Connacht and Kerry. The last time Dublin played at Croke Park, the GAA didn’t give out the attendance, presumably out of mortification at the fact that only about 11,000 people went. Now, with two double-bills down for decision, there’s talk of somewhere in the region of 100,000 through the gates over the two days. Football could do with making this a weekend where there’s something special to see.
It ain’t necessarily so. Not always and never across the board. The quarter-final stage has long since become the point at the season where the pollyannas among us shed our innocence. We kid ourselves each year that the last eight are all arriving at the big house with ponytails and dreams intact. Then we watch as they get ruthlessly shorn of every last strand.
This will be the 20th iteration of quarter-final knockout matches since they came in 2001. Whatever the appeal of this stage of the competition, it has been a long time since close games were part of the deal. Pop quiz, hotshot — which was the last season where the quarter-finals didn’t include at least one double-digit beating? If you were able to pluck 2010 out of the memory bank without looking, you’re a better brain than the rest of us.
These games tend to get away from teams who aren’t used to the stage — and even some who are. Ritual slaughter has been an abiding feature of these weekends back to the mid-2000s. It wasn’t such a thing in the early years — between 2001 and 2007, the average margin of victory in an All-Ireland quarter-final was a shade under 4.5 points.
Cork’s 1-11 to 0-8 win over Sligo in 2007 was comfortably the biggest win of the round. In those first seven seasons, 33 quarter-final games were played, including replays. Only three of them ended with 10 or more between the teams. Once in every 11 games, in other words.
The numbers have been adrenalised and turbocharged in the years since then. Taking out Covid years and Super-8s, there have been 12 seasons of knock-out quarter-final matches between 2008 and 2023. The average margin of victory across that period is a hair under eight points. Out of 49 matches, 16 have ended in double-digit maulings. Once in every three games, give or take.
All of which is intended as a public health warning of sorts in advance of this weekend. A quick squiz at the bookmakers’ prognostications tells us that they reckon no game this weekend will be decided by more than five points. Modern history tells us they are dead wrong. Let’s see.
This year’s line-up brings back four of the eight who made to this stage in 2023. Take out Monaghan, Mayo, Tyrone and Cork. Slide in Donegal, Galway, Roscommon and Louth to go alongside Kerry, Dublin, Derry and Armagh. The best eight teams in the country? Probably not. But if Mayo and/or Tyrone are better, they only have themselves to blame for not being here to show people why.
Each team has its story to tell. Unlike last year, Kerry arrive with a pristine record. Five games played, five games won. They haven’t been behind since midway through the second half of their opener against Cork. In their last four matches, they’ve only been level for a total of nine minutes altogether — and never past the seventh minute. They’ve done their business early and often and they topped their group with the best points difference of anyone.
Anyone imagining Jack O’Connor’s team might be coming in here undercooked is probably grasping at straws. For all that they’ve faced no real opposition — they haven’t seen a Division One team since last year’s All-Ireland final — that has never been much of a hindrance before. Their last five quarter-final appearances have ended in victories by 12, eight, eight, 11 and 27 points. They tend to use these games not so much to blow off the cobwebs as sandblast them.
In that light, there has to be a danger that Derry are sitting ducks on Sunday. They didn’t get out of Castlebar until just short of 10pm last Saturday night and can’t have seen their beds until the wee hours. For all that Mickey Harte has broadened out the Derry panel, he only trusted a core of 18 players when push came to shove against Mayo, reintroducing three players in extra-time who had come off during normal time.
We already know from last year that the rigours of the preliminary quarter-final feel like lead weights in the saddle bag the following weekend. Yet none of the 2023 teams got there by fighting through extra-time and penalties to get to the last eight like Derry have had to. Maybe Mickey Harte can sell his players the notion that they’re battle-hardened where Kerry are soft but there’s no real evidence for that. It will go down as one of his more spectacular coups if he does.
And what of the Dubs? Unlike Kerry, they’ve had to put their game through an MRI and have been forced to work a few things out on the fly. Louth gave them plenty of it in the Leinster final and led at half-time. Mayo should have beaten them. We will be surprised when the day dawns that they turn around and find themselves at the end of the road. But it will be hard to be shocked.
Of the 20 players they used to eke out that crucial draw in Dr Hyde Park a fortnight ago, eight are on the cheery-bye side of 30 and Cormac Costello hits the big three zero in a few weeks. They can’t get James McCarthy fit. Jack McCaffrey’s cameos are thrilling but all too short. Lee Gannon and Cian Murphy are stubbornly injured. Dublin’s cupboard will never be bare but it isn’t bulging like it used to. Nothing ever lasts forever.
Maybe they’re blessed in their opposition. Galway arrive into the last eight like men who had been trying to keep a bockety raft lashed together with tree vines just long enough to wash up on the sand. Injuries have tugged on their tail for a long time now — in 28 league and championship games since the 2022 All-Ireland final, Shane Walsh and Damien Comer have completed 70 minutes together just twice. Joyce needs whatever they have this weekend. Every drop of it.
They all do. Louth are in the last eight for the first time since the 1960 Leinster final. Roscommon haven’t won a game in Croke Park since 1980. Armagh used to rule these matches but have lost their last six quarter-finals in a row, the most recent two on penalties. The last time Donegal made an All-Ireland semi-final, Jim McGuinness was still in his first stint and still had some black in his hair.
Everybody has a story to tell. If history is any guide, it’ll be Dublin, Kerry, Donegal and maybe the Rossies as the wild card. What fun we’ll have if any more than one of those predictions is wrong. However it plays out, the football summer has only three weekends left.
Concentrate.
