Football

Kicking Out: Knockout football is, and always will be, king

Ruairi Deane of Cork celebrates after his side scored a last second goal during the Munster GAA Football Senior Championship Semi-Final match between Cork and Kerry at Páirc Uí Chaoimh in Cork. Photo by Brendan Moran/Sportsfile
Ruairi Deane of Cork celebrates after his side scored a last second goal during the Munster GAA Football Senior Championship Semi-Final match between Cork and Kerry at Páirc Uí Chaoimh in Cork. Photo by Brendan Moran/Sportsfile Ruairi Deane of Cork celebrates after his side scored a last second goal during the Munster GAA Football Senior Championship Semi-Final match between Cork and Kerry at Páirc Uí Chaoimh in Cork. Photo by Brendan Moran/Sportsfile

THE opening chapter of the peerless Daniel Taylor’s book ‘I Believe in Miracles’ that charts Brian Clough’s journey with Nottingham Forest is titled ‘Nowheresville’.

When he took over, they were thirteenth in the Second Division and five points off the relegation places.

Nowheresville is precisely where Forest came from to win two European Cups, a First Division title, a European Super Cup and four league cups under his command.

He had already achieved the same miracle as Derby County manager and when he walked in through the doors of the City Ground, a city walked in behind him, full of new hopes and dreams.

In the late ‘70s, change could be made happen, rather than bought.

They achieved the unthinkable and Clough’s Forest made everyone a dreamer. If they can do it, no reason we can’t.

Dreams are lost on professional soccer now.

The Premier League and Champions League have created mass problems. The sport very quickly became about money after Sky started pumping in millions, and UEFA took a decision that the Champions League shouldn’t actually be for champions.

As a result, Porto are the only European champions from outside England, Spain, Italy or Germany in the last 25 years.

Now they’re talking about a European Super League and the big English clubs assuming domestic control as they dangle huge, badly needed payments for the Football League (£250m) and the FA (£100m) like a ransom, only to be given in return for supporting a project which would have catastrophic long-term consequences.

That is what happens when you become obsessed with the product at the expense of the sport itself.

The Super 8s are the GAA’s equivalent of the Champions League.

It’s Dublin v Tyrone and Kerry v Mayo every week. For spectators, there’s obvious appeal. The better teams meeting each other in the big games, who wouldn’t want that?

But it has come at a cost that cannot be afforded in the long run.

The qualifiers were sold on the basis that they would help level the playing field because the weaker counties would get more games.

The great leveller has become the great lie.

Antrim’s game against Cavan on Saturday afternoon was their 50th Championship game in the 20 seasons since the back door was installed.

Carlow have played 52. Limerick, 62. Sligo, 64.

Tyrone’s loss in Ballybofey was their 120th Championship game in the same period. Mayo have played 101.

Between the pair of them, they’ve played 74 championship games in the last five years alone.

That’s hardly rebalancing the books.

There have only been six different All-Ireland finalists since 2003. Only eight teams have won it since the back door was introduced.

Compare that to the 20 years previous, when there were 13 different finalists and 11 different winners.

Cork have been in Nowheresville for the last eight years. Of no threat to Kerry, they bombed all the way to Division Three.

So much has changed even since their last win over the old enemy in 2012. Football has evolved.

If there was a back door and a Super 8s system in play this year, you could be absolutely, 100 per cent certain that Kerry would outlast Cork in the championship.

They would take the lessons of the weekend, regroup and push on.

Perhaps it wasn’t the intention but the qualifiers have only made the strong even stronger.

The sheer volume of Kerry voices in the meeja has meant Ronan McCarthy’s team have had precious little credit the last 36 hours.

Right on the throw-in, Aidan Maguire reached for David Moran and started a wrestling match. They carried that aggression through and aided by the conditions and Kerry’s restrictive style, Cork did what has become a most un-Cork thing and turned up for a dogfight.

Even they wouldn’t have dreamed that when Luke Connolly’s final effort started to tail off to the right, that it would end up in the lap of Mark Keane and then the back of the Kerry net.

To have had a full Páirc Úi Chaoimh would have been to have been joyous but it’s an image that will endure anyway. The empty seats of 2020 will see to that, but so too the knockout element.

We are all dreamers, and recently there’s been precious little for most to dream of.

Ulster men, women and children of the time go misty around the eyes when they talk of the early ‘90s. How one decade after the other of whippings in Croke Park frittered away and this run of All-Irelands arrived in their place.

Derry and Down may never be back. We can argue that a back door might have seen Derry win more than one, but it might have seen them win none at all. Imagine an All-Ireland final against Down or Donegal or Tyrone of that time. An absolute lottery.

The cards fell and the men of the time played them. If you were good enough, you won. If you didn’t, you went home and that was it.

Kerry, Tyrone and Monaghan are gone from this year’s championship. On go Down, Cavan, Laois, Tipperary and Cork – all of them coming in from or bound for Division Three, the home of the Tailteann Cup.

One of Cork, Tipperary, Galway or Mayo will play in the 2020 All-Ireland final.

Tipperary will be driven by the emotion of playing on the 100th anniversary of Bloody Sunday.

That it’s a game they now feel they can win, and a game that propels the winner straight into the last four of the All-Ireland series, only adds to the huge significance.

They’ve not won a Munster title since 1935 and never will they have a better chance. Never could it mean more than it would next weekend. They will not feel the emptiness around them if the hunger within them is sated.

Knockout football stood to the year’s club championships. Dungannon are the most high-profile tale, and there’s no way they’d have won a back door championship. They just would not have come past Errigal or Trillick twice.

It was driven by a magic potion of momentum and fearlessness and history, something so hard to get right.

There’s no championship system that will fix the inter-county game. That has to come from sacrificing the growing brilliance of the National Leagues as a spectacle by spreading the quality across the divisions.

The best playing the best repeatedly is good for the inner sanctum but it only crushes the dreams of the rest.

Knockout football is, and always will be, king.