At 7.53am on Friday morning, at the junction of Summerhill and MacCurtain Street, a small grey car sporting a Tipperary flag was seen driving towards Cork city centre. There are no laws against flying county flags in March or before the league has finished, but there is an accepted code of conduct. This breach was brass-necked and brazen.
The fundamental issue is hype. In the GAA it has a short window. Every sport needs the vitamin D from sunlight, but every sport spends part of the year in the shade and sourcing its vitamin D from supplements. In the GAA that deficiency lasts for months.
In many respects it is self-inflicted. Despite the over-egged radio ads and the earnest TV commercials, the appeal of the national leagues has a threshold that is rarely crossed. The current complaint is that the football league finals are too close to the start of the provincial championships, and the widely touted solution is to find an extra week in next year’s calendar.
But will a fortnight really make a transformative difference? Scroll back 10 years: in 2015 there was a three-week gap between the football league final and the opening rounds of the championship, with the exception of Galway’s visit to New York.
Ten years before that just a handful of first round games were played a fortnight after the league final. For other counties, in the staggered schedule, the gap would have been more than a month. For many years a two-week gap was the absolute minimum, but in the old calendar time travelled on a canal, and two weeks felt like a whirlwind turnaround.
Agonising about reaching a league final, though, was just as entrenched in the GAA psyche then as it is now, regardless of the calendar. Same questions: Is it worth it? Will people think we’re foolish? Will we pay a price?
Part of this phenomenon is the inherent suspicion of hype in the GAA. Teams see it as kryptonite. In his Irish Examiner column last Monday, Anthony Daly spelt it out.
“Cork are going to find it hard to keep a lid on the hype,” he wrote. “I’m not adding to the hype. Cork are doing that by themselves by playing as well as they are. And they’re not just winning – they’re blowing teams out of the water. How do you row that back? You can’t. Nobody in Cork wants them to.”
Daly had already fielded accusations from Cork fans of being a cunning purveyor of hype after his Saturday column, in which he was guilty of praising Cork. According to Cork fans, this was proof positive that Daly was a propagandist acting for the far-west Clare regime.
The perennial problem for the GAA at this time of the year is that whatever hype exists is ultimately seen as counterfeit. Any team worth taking seriously is expected to show good form in moderation. All-out exhibitions of brilliance are immediately queried. Or dismissed. As soon as Cork scored six goals in Ennis three weeks ago all heads turned to the retribution coming down the track on Easter Sunday. Hype postponed.
The final round of matches in the football league is the most hyped Sunday in the first part of the year, but even that can’t be trusted any longer. On RTÉ’s highlights programme Ciaran Whelan was scandalised by the lack of intensity in Division One matches that ought to have meant something. The slow bicycle race ended in a blanket finish.
After the hype-vacuum of the football league finals, the provincial football championships begin next weekend to the sound of a brass section but not a fanfare. With the new rules the mismatches in the early weeks of the season will be characterised by greater massacres than before.
Be prepared for the head-shaking and the hand-wringing and another round of feeble explanations about why the football championship is being held hostage by a provincial system that is no longer fit for purpose.
For all the contenders the games that will define their season are weeks away yet. The vast majority of what happens between now and then will be hype-repellent. Before we know it half the year will be gone.
So, hype must be embraced wherever it materialises. It must not be disparaged or defused. The most reliable source of hype in the GAA has always been a rush on tickets. For that to happen for hurling league finals is a beautiful freak.
By last Tuesday all tickets for the league final double bill in Páirc Uí Chaoimh next Sunday had been sold. It won’t necessarily be a full house unless all the season ticket holders from the four competing counties accept the offer of a ticket. They have until next Friday to decide. If they don’t turn up it will still be counted as a sold ticket.
Anyway, less of the semantics. There will be at least 40,000 people in Páirc Uí Chaoimh on the first Sunday of April for a pair of hurling matches that, according to the hype-meter and the calendar, shouldn’t matter that much.
At this stage the GAA cannot take big crowds for granted. Attendances for games administered centrally by Croke Park – the national leagues and the All-Ireland series – fell for the third year in a row in 2024. The Dublin following and the Mayo crowd, two of the GAA’s biggest money-spinners since the turn of the century, have both receded to an alarming degree.
The Leinster football championship has become so hollowed out that it looks like the semi-finals will finally be taken out of Croke Park. Last year’s double header attracted a crowd of just 21,957; the final attracted 23,113. Dublin won their 14th title in a row. Imagine being the circus barker for that.
This week Tipperary bring their crack under-20 team to Páirc Uí Chaoimh on Wednesday and their improving senior team on Sunday. To the small grey car with the fluttering Tipp flag, driving through Cork, making heads turn, beating a little drum of hype: we salute you.
