Neil McManus wants the Ulster senior hurling championship to be revived as soon as possible – and believes it could be done as early as next season if fixture-makers had the desire to make it happen.
The former Antrim hurler retired from the intercounty game at the end of the 2023 campaign but will be part of Davy Fitzgerald’s back room team with the Saffrons in 2025. And he feels the resurrection of the Ulster championship would help with the development of the game in the province.
McManus, who is a member of the National Hurling Development Committee, says a competitive Ulster senior hurling championship – without Antrim, who have been allowed to compete in Leinster since 2009 – would be possible to arrange within a matter of months. The last Ulster senior hurling championship was contested in 2017 when Antrim beat Armagh in the final to claim a 16th consecutive provincial crown.
There have been suggestions in the recent past of establishing an all Ulster team without Antrim players or an all Connacht team without Galway players, but McManus feels there is a better way to grow the game.
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“I’m not in favour of that. I think counties need to be helped to stand alone really,” he says. “Why do we not play an Ulster championship without Antrim? While Antrim are competing in Leinster they should compete in Leinster and the rest of the counties within Ulster.
“The games that you would have between Derry, Down, think about where Donegal are at now, how competitive they would be. If we seeded it, I drew it out once just because I’m talking about it a lot, and if we seeded that competition properly it would be a brilliant hurling competition.
“And it could be done in a festival of hurling where we do it over two or three weeks. It’s not going to have a huge impact on the calendar. We could have the Ulster championship back in 2025 if the will was there.”
Closer to home McManus will be working with the Antrim hurlers as a performance coach next year in what will be Fitzgerald’s first season at the helm with the Saffrons.
“I think we need to learn as much from Davy as we can,” adds McManus. “I’m really happy that so many of the back room team are Antrim people because we need to get the information, the know-how from Davy and keep it within Antrim, build up our own capabilities so we can look after our own affairs in the future. Davy has won Munster with Waterford, won the All-Ireland with Clare, won Leinster with Wexford, so there’s a lot of experience for us to tap into there.”
On the wider issue of the development of the game across the island, McManus believes some non-traditional hurling counties need to look at how they treat the small-ball code. “Call a spade a spade, sometimes the people in charge of Gaelic games in counties don’t have any interest in hurling. And they schedule fixtures with no thought towards the development of hurling at all, and we’re going to have to stop that.”
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