The All-Ireland hurling preliminary quarter-finals are back on the chopping block. Special Congress, on October 4th, will hear a motion that the fixtures featuring the Joe McDonagh Cup winners and runners up against the third-placed teams in Munster and Leinster are to be scrapped.
This Friday, Central Council delegates will get the full list of motions going to Special Congress and it is anticipated, tucked in among the FRC headline acts, there will be the end of the ritual hammerings for teams either heartbroken or hungover after the end of their actual championship. It is overdue.
Laois’ victory over Dublin in the 2019 championship remains the only time that a Joe McDonagh team has taken down one of the big guns. There have been few signs of any other team doing likewise since.
This year Tipperary hammered Laois by 23 points and Dublin beat Kildare by 21. That result merits barely a footnote in the Lilywhites’s season, and that is how it should be.
The second half of the All-Ireland final will be the defining memory many of us have of the 2025 hurling season. But the next best thing after the summer just gone was Kildare’s run through the Joe McDonagh Cup.
Dublin beating Limerick in an All-Ireland quarter-final was one thing, but their performance in the subsequent semi-final put a dent in that memory ... for me, at least.
Kildare’s season ended with a hammering, and so did Dublin’s. Why is it one team can simply shrug off a beating and the other can’t?
Because Kildare started their season in one competition and ended it in another.
The focus of all Joe McDonagh Cup teams at the start of every year is to win the Joe McDonagh Cup. It is most definitely not to have a pop at whoever comes third in Munster and Leinster.
Kildare will get an opportunity against the top teams next year – they didn’t need that chance a week after their greatest ever hurling success.
The original idea behind the preliminary quarter-finals was, presumably, to give the teams in the second tier relevance to the national picture. But despite minimal TV coverage, and negligible coverage everywhere else, the Joe McDonagh Cup has managed to carve a niche for itself. It doesn’t (and probably never did) need an additional ‘carrot’ in the form of a chance to get hammered by a team playing at a higher level to make winning it absolutely worthwhile.
The intrinsic benefit of winning a second-tier final is something that is baked into GAA peoples’ psyche. Winning an intermediate county championship is a huge honour for clubs, but the idea that you’d expect to enter the senior club championship at the quarter-final stage as a reward for doing so would be ridiculous if it was suggested by a county board.
For the GAA to do it in the All-Ireland championship never made sense, regardless of any misguided idea about promoting the sport.
The counties in the second tier are not, for the most part, counties that have a dismissive attitude to hurling. They are actually some of the few genuinely dual counties in the country – Laois, Carlow, Westmeath.
If the motion to drop the preliminary quarter-finals goes through, and all the mood music (including from Jarlath Burns, writing in the All-Ireland final programme) now suggests it will, it opens up an opportunity for the Joe McDonagh Cup to be played much later in the summer and to be given a proper platform.
At the moment, it has to fight for oxygen with the Munster and Leinster championships, leaving aside the football altogether.
The start and finish of the competition this year was in direct opposition to the start and finish of the two provincial jamborees. That was a battle for column inches and TV minutes they were never going to win.
The preliminary quarters have been the sixth and seventh-last games of the intercounty hurling summer every year since the inception of the provincial round-robins. If they are scrapped, and (as is the case with the Tailteann Cup in football) the plan would be to then play the Joe McDonagh final before an All-Ireland semi-final on the first weekend of July, that would give half of May and all of June over in large part to the Joe McDonagh.
Leaving aside the preliminary quarter-finals, there were only four intercounty hurling games played in the entire month of June this year, which is one fewer than played over the course of just one day in May (the 25th, the last day of the provincials). At a time when the number of hurling games falls off a cliff, the Joe McDonagh would be there to fill the gap.
Hurling has its own informal PR wing, in print, online and in podcasts. Instead of burying the intermediate competition in the midst of the high profile stuff, they would have the room in June to give it its proper place. This is not to say that the coverage on TV and elsewhere would, or should, be equal to the Big Show – but it would give it a chance. That is all it needs.
