As it stands right now, Limerick and Antrim are on course to gain promotion from Division Three of the National Football League, and are in the main draw for the Sam Maguire Cup later this year. The question is - do they want to?
This obviously was not a question you would even ask until this year. If you’re in Division Three, you want to be in Division Two, and if you’re in one of the top two positions at the end of seven games, then that’s where you deserve to be.
Incremental progress is what the league is based on, and it’s how Clare got to where they are, solidly mid-table in Division Two, and it’s how Derry have built year on year under Rory Gallagher.
A prosperous Tailteann Cup has the potential to muddy the waters, however. Antrim were promoted from Division Four last year, Limerick just the year before. It is to their credit that they’ve adapted so quickly to the higher level of competition - remember Limerick only lost a Division Three promotion playoff to Derry by 4 points last year, and Derry are currently one of the form teams in the country.
But if the Tailteann Cup was really worth winning, would they be happier to try and win a trophy in Croke Park in high summer than to take a league promotion, and a probable early exit from the Sam Maguire competition? Winning silverware, in front of a massive crowd, with promotion to the tier one championship guaranteed for the following year anyway, regardless of your league position?
We have the rather strange situation this year where the Tailteann Cup is being launched in a format that will be used for precisely one year - a straight series of knock-out games, with the final to be played as a curtain-raiser to a Sam Maguire semi-final on the second weekend in July.
The rate of change in the GAA has rarely been described as dizzying, but it is rather confusing. Over the last 6 months, a new championship structure was debated, discussed, voted down, tweaked, and then voted in - but that doesn’t come in until 2023.
Nevertheless this year’s championship is still a legitimately tiered championship, and with a brand new trophy to be handed out, which is usually enough change for any given decade in the GAA.
So the 2022 iteration of the Tailteann Cup stands as a kind of zombie championship, with this already fairly sweeping change in the landscape lasting for only one year until the ‘real’ change happens next year, with early provincial championships, four groups of four and all of that.
I’m cleaving to the, increasingly forlorn, hope that it’s because of this place-holder feel to the 2022 championship that we have seen and heard precisely zero plans for why teams should care about the Tailteann Cup other than that it exists, important people have put their necks on the line for it, and fixtures need to be fulfilled. Delaying the start of the Tailteann Cup for a year, to launch it at the same time as the biggest restructuring of the All-Ireland championship in 140 years, might have been wise.
But - back to Limerick and Antrim. They’re currently doing everything right. They have informed, enlightened managers, and in a division with teams like Laois and Westmeath and Fermanagh, they’re playing all the football and are richly deserving of their current position.
As far as they’re concerned, the question I posed at the top is an utter no-brainer. In the absence of any coherent plan to make the Tailteann Cup something really worth fighting for, they need to keep trucking on and fighting for those promotion places.
For Limerick, if that means a Munster quarter-final defeat to Clare, followed by a (maybe hefty) round one qualifier defeat to Galway or Armagh or whoever, then so be it.
They are currently playing well enough not to fear Clare, or Tipperary or Waterford on that side of the Munster championship draw, and may well be one of those Division Three or Division Four teams that upsets the applecart and qualifies for the Sam Maguire Cup because of their provincial championship performance, not their league position, in any case.
Reading Offaly manager Michael Fennelly’s thoughts on how the league has been de-fanged to the detriment of the 10th, 11th, and 12th best hurling teams in the country in these pages on Saturday, and listening to Antrim’s Neil McManus on the BBC’s GAA Social podcast this Monday, really brought home the limitations of the tiered championship in hurling, so often held up as an exemplar to football.
We are dealing with teams and counties that are well used to being treated as an after-thought. They are very acutely attuned to the idea that the games and competitions in which they play are viewed as unimportant, or are a distraction from the real show.
Until the GAA gives the Tailteann Cup some love, the message appears to be that Division Three teams need not worry about anything other than getting the hell out of there as quickly as they can.
