It’s arrived, the least anticipated national football league season throw’s-in this weekend and someone might need to wake the teams up!
Hurling threw back-in on Saturday and with the exception of one national newspaper it seemed to arrive with little or no fanfare or fuss.
We are living in strange times and they have impacted absolutely everything. Here we are in May starting out the league campaign, there’s been no O’Byrne Cup, no challenge match on a winter night, no 58th man in the panel.
Even for myself, there has been no trip to Croke Park on a Tuesday morning for a media day with last year’s divisional champions, no big speech from Allianz on how committed to the GAA they are as a room full of cynical hacks are taken away from the sausage rolls.
Ringing a number of inter-county managers the usual buzz ahead of the league starting hasn’t come down the phone, more a hesitancy toward players avoiding injury as a higher number of soft tissue injuries are expected due to the extended break.
While managers plans themselves have been thrown out of kilter a couple of times.
Any manager worth their salt will have a player development plan, always looking toward blooding the young lad with an eye to the following championship or even league campaign.
Reminding me of the Peter Schmeichel story of how he once went to watch Manchester United train after he had left. Alex Ferguson brought him over to the under-19 team practice and pointed at individuals to say “he’ll get on the senior team bench twice season, he’ll play one league game, the guy on the left will play an F.A Cup game”.
However the new league structure has thrown all this out.
It’s a cut throat league, every game matters and it really matters. One slip up in game one or two and you’re fighting to avoid a relegation play-off.
Never before has pressure been piled onto three games like this. The temptation to experiment may have just been another causality of the covid pandemic.
While the lack of pre-season games have thrown up issues for managers, so too surprisingly has the announced return of minor and under-20 teams.
Roscommon hurling manager Johnny Keane explained to me how some of his hurling panel didn’t expect to have any football with the U20’s, now all of a sudden a couple of clashes have arisen.
Every senior inter-county manager across the country wasn’t expecting to be in a position to call in players from the U20 or minor panels in the case of emergency. Now ahead of the championship arriving the reserves have become available.
The return of action has been rather subdued, even allowing for the screaming and shouting of many a Gael, the slow unwinding of the countries restrictions has calmed down the roars.
From a place of no U20 football occurring this year we now have the fixtures and it feels very much like those angry shouts will have to move target.
The League of Ireland returned nearly two months ago and was met by some Gael’s with unhappiness, but even that has just faded away as the reality of soccer in an empty stadium were Shamrock Rovers still win just continues.
Similarly when hurling returned this weekend, the general lack of excitement was further more extinguished by Galway keeping the foot on the accelerator and scoring five goals and 34 points to Westmeath’s 1-16.
“A good game of hurling is hard to beat”, but they don’t seem to care about the total miss-matches.
To be fair to our hurling friends, sport is a cruel business and the miss-match of ability occurs across the board never mind which sport or game, it is unfortunately the reality of competitiveness.
The worry for Westmeath is Limerick and Tipperary lie in wait. Similarly for Laois who Wexford managed to slay by a mere 19 points, next up is Kilkenny.
The structure of this season’s league may just be that problem. Monaghan or Roscommon must have the same shivering fear at the back of their minds.
Defeat will not be anything like the score line Westmeath suffered, but a first game defeat isn’t made any easier by the second and third game opponents.
Everyone is hamstrung a little bit here, the GAA are running out of dates. The teams haven’t had enough training, something had to give and what promises to be the most cut throat national league season in living memory is about to begin.
That lack of excitement, well I do expected that to repaired by May 23rd, well at least for 75% of the teams who will chase a league semi-final the following week.
At the end of it all normality is slowing returning, Saturday and Sunday’s on the sideline with wireless radio’s and sandwiches on the go will soon return.
And in the end Dublin will still be kings.
