A WEEK after Tyrone had put Donegal’s dying dog of a year out of its misery, their own mortality became very evident against Kerry.
Just seven days separated the two counties’ exit from the All-Ireland series. Derry were the Ulster last team standing. Their campaign lasted 15 days longer than Tyrone’s.
Two weeks and a day after the Tyrone-Donegal clash, the sky above O’Donnell Park was uninterrupted blue.
St Eunan’s were hosting Naomh Conaill in the latest instalment of their big club rivalry in recent years.
Read More
- Cahair O'Kane: Meaningless matches are killing the club scene
- "What does chamoionship football mean?" - Eamon McGee, Fionntan Devlin and Kieran Howe on the state of club football
- Replays re-introduced for 2023 Tyrone championship games
- Club Championship dreams... The contenders for Ulster's intermediate and junior titles
They’ve sparred off against each other so often that wounds have so little time to heal. But they’d both already qualified for the league final, creating a smell of dead rubber around Letterkenny.
It was the second last round of the league, and the first time county players had been available to clubs in Donegal this year.
At €5-a-head, the takings at the gate amounted to around €300. That’s sixty-odd paying supporters.
Barring the players’ families, former player and now club chairman John Haran reckons there weren’t thirty other people in the ground that afternoon.
The league final resulted in a more comfortable one-point win for Naomh Conaill than the margin suggests. When they met again in the Donegal championship at the weekend, there was a bit more fire and brimstone.
St Eunan’s landed with their swords drawn. By the end, it felt like the Glenties men that had dealt the psychological blow.
They’ll both qualify for the knockout stages no matter how hard they’d try not to. Having eliminated four teams at the end of a 16-team group stage last year, Donegal decided they’d throw in a preliminary quarter-final and make sure everyone gets either a knockout game or a relegation playoff.
So what’s the point of the group stage then?
The clubs in Donegal had their county players available for the last two games of the regulation league, and that was only owing to the fact Aidan O’Rourke’s side didn’t reach an All-Ireland quarter-final. Had they survived another week or two, the league would have been finished without them.
In Derry, the entire 13-game league was played off without county men. Same in Monaghan, where a Scotstown team that are unbackable to win the championship needed to win a relegation playoff in the league.
Go around Ireland and you’ll find there are very few counties that are much different.
The involvement of county players in club football is almost exclusively restricted to championship.
Yet Tyrone’s players are available for at ten league games every year (it was 12 in 2022) plus whatever their club’s championship campaign amounts to.
They are very much the exception.
* * * * *
GAOTH Dobhair’s and formerly Donegal’s Eamon McGee can vividly recall his early senior experiences in Kilcar. The picture postcard ground cut into the side of a mountain had enough rough edges that he wouldn’t forget it.
“There’s a wee place called The Hill where the Kilcar crew sit. They used to f***ing hate the McGees and shout the wildest abuse. That was in league games. They’d be baying for your blood.
“It’s just not there any more. I miss that.”
In last year’s club leagues in Derry relegation was removed altogether, reducing it to a series of glorified challenge games.
That was reversed this year and led to a cut-throat battle at the bottom to avoid the drop. Just two points separated 13th placed Lavey and sixth-placed Loup in the final table.
The clubs have moved from a league played with no county men into a championship of two groups of seven teams each from which the top four in each section qualify for the knockout stages.
Whoever wins the John McLaughlin Cup will have played nine championship games just to get out of Derry. Add three in Ulster and two more in an All-Ireland series, it becomes a long way to Croke Park for a county well used to providing teams for the latter stages.
So naturally, the stronger teams have eased into it, happy to be without key men knowing they’ll get out of the group somehow.
There was quite clearly no love lost between Naomh Conaill and St Eunan’s on Sunday. Theirs was a tetchy affair but at the end of a 0-9 apiece draw, it was just shake hands and go home. Nobody ever really wins, nobody ever really loses. They’ll both go through anyway.
“What does championship football mean? My vision of championship football is going into the last ten minutes, nip and tuck, and you need to get over the line,” says McGee.
“I know we want meaningful leagues, but are they trying to balance out the lack of that with championship games? If we have a competitive league, we don’t need to do that.
“Worst case scenario, say six league games without county players and then six with, just to pick a figure off the top of my head. Then two or three championship games and if you lose them, tough shit, but they’re meaningful.
“This preliminary quarter-final is the most ridiculous concept, and it’s in Donegal this year too. It’s like the Go Games, a medal for everybody here.
“To me, championship football is that balls out, last 10 minutes where people are doing crazy, illogical things.”
His mind naturally goes back to that most chaotic of games between Donegal and Kildare 12 years ago. Two minutes into stoppage time at the end of normal time, Rory Kavanagh bundles Morgan O’Flaherty over. David Coldrick gives the free, a certain equaliser for the Lilywhites.
“I don’t know what I was thinking but the ref was pointing Kildare’s way and I actually grabbed his hand and pushed it down, as if it was gonna stop him and he’d change his decision. It just meant so much to me.
“That’s championship football. I’m not saying to put your hands on a referee but at any championship game, that’s what it should mean. And then supporters see that and it’s a knock-on effect.”
The group stages and back doors and what-have-yous certainly undermine the bigger games early on.
The crowd in Páirc Esler on Sunday night for Burren-Warrenpoint, a meeting of two of Down’s big hitters, was distinctly underwhelming.
Nobody really wins, nobody really loses.
* * * * *
FIONNTAN Devlin is in charge of his native Loup, who are in relegation bother in Derry after losing to Steelstown at the weekend.
There’s never been relegation through the championship in Derry before. It’s an entirely new concept that everyone’s trying to get their heads around.
Loup goalkeeper Thomas Mallon was the only county player to kick a ball in the regulation league in Derry this year, having been called in mid-championship as emergency cover for Odhran Lynch when Ryan Scullion got injured.
That meant they had a full hand while others didn’t. The Loup are safe in the league and despite losing their first three championship games, they have at least another three to play and could still avoid relegation there too.
“I don’t like the format in Derry this year at all,” says Devlin.
“It’s probably suited The Loup but I’d have preferred a better league with more county player involvement and a knockout championship. That’s my own preference.
“My own view is still the model in Tyrone is what we should look at.”
He won an Ulster Club as a player twenty years ago and has spent all of that time teaching and coaching school teams alongside Pascal Canavan in St Ciaran’s, Ballygawley.
The former Antrim coach ended up doing a few years with Errigal Ciaran at a stage.
What he, and others, see different is that in Tyrone, the league means something.
“Winning the league in Tyrone is still very important. I don’t think you could say that about too many other counties in Ulster. The clubs aren’t willing to compromise on that.
“They’ve probably struck the best balance at the minute whereas in Derry, we’re wide of it at the minute.”
The Devil’s Advocate position would say that Derry have just won back-to-back Ulster titles, been in successive All-Ireland semi-finals.
Teams like this don’t come around that often and the buzz around them has tipped the scales of Derry football that had been for so long heavily weighted towards the club scene.
In Down and Antrim, both Conor Laverty and Andy McEntee (as well as his predecessor Enda McGinley) were praised for showing some flexibility in terms of player availability to clubs.
Both Laverty and McEntee routinely released those outside the first 18-to-20 on the county team to play for their clubs throughout the season, and the Down boss even allowed clubs their full hand while awaiting the start of the Tailteann Cup.
The two counties went deep into that tournament, yet clubs in Down still had five club league games and Antrim footballers were available for four.
* * * * *
IF Kieran Howe was to start 2023 over again, he wouldn’t have had Killyclogher back on the pitch in February.
Not that it’s done them much harm. In past years they’d have been without three or four leading lights away with Tyrone. This year, they had nobody on active service.
On Sunday afternoon they beat leaders Dromore to go top of Division One. They all have two games left in the normal league season before the top-four playoffs decide the destination of the title, bottom team goes down and the next two above them play-off. Then it’s straight knockout championship.
With the exception of getting football out of the way in Kilkenny, Tyrone’s is the only kill or be killed football championship left in Ireland. The other 30 counties have all dropped a safety net of some description beneath their early round games.
If anyone tried that in Tyrone, the clubs would be out in the dark of night cutting the net down.
Why are they able to have such a fiercely competitive league and leave clubs in favour of a straight knockout championship that is railed against almost everywhere else?
Access to players is the simple answer.
In any given year, they’ll play a maximum of five of their 15 league games without county players. Last year, with Tyrone’s early exit, it was just three. Those games are referred to as ‘starred’ games.
The starred system matches teams up as best it can in terms of how many men they’re all missing on county duty.
For the other ten games, they all have a full hand to choose from.
The other thing they’ve done different is adapted to the premise of the split season more quickly. While most club leagues began in March or early April, Tyrone didn’t start theirs until May.
That’s really what’s at the heart of this going forward. While almost every other county aims to effectively get a league out of the way to protect their county players, Tyrone aim to hold theirs back and prioritise the welfare of club football.
“Every game is like a championship game,” says the Killyclogher boss.
“Anybody can beat anybody in Tyrone and you always want to build momentum and not be in trouble at the end of the year, so you tend to take every single game as serious as you can.
“That’s reflective of the effort that goes into it and the support that comes out then too.”
The fear of falling behind other clubs brought Killyclogher to grass earlier than they’d planned but that will pass. Clubs will fairly quickly learn to move away from early January starts to pre-season for a league that isn’t starting until May.
“It’s not always perfect but I don’t know how you’d go about getting a perfect system,” says Howe.
“This year’s been better in that Tyrone had a very delayed start to the leagues, although all of the clubs – ourselves included – were out a wee bit too early trying to adjust to the timings of it.
“[The clubs are protective of it] and rightly so. It’s very competitive and brings the standard of the club player up you’d imagine, which is bound to be an advantage in the overall picture.
“I’d imagine that’s a big contributor to county success. Most clubs don’t want to be without county players at all.
“If they could do away with the starred games they would do. I’ve seen different formats and I think we’re at the best one.
“I’ve looked around at other counties and sometimes they don’t even have relegation in their leagues, you’d wonder about the benefit of that.”
Derry’s league was finished and Donegal’s virtually so by the time their county men came back.
“Maybe I was ignorant at the time but I understood the split season to be a split season: this is your county season, this is your club season and you’ll have both,” says Eamon McGee, who felt his ability to step back in with Gaoth Dobhair after the U20s with no real fitness work done was indicative of things.
“The reality is we don’t have our county players for the league and I don’t think that’s healthy for league football in general.
“League football at senior level in Donegal isn’t really that competitive. It’s a lot of box-ticking. We’re flipping sick of hearing ‘shadow boxing’ but that’s all the league was.
“Whatever teams were gonna fight relegation would have been competitive but if you knew you’re gonna stay safe, there’s no edge to games at all.
“The solution is to start the club season a bit later. We’re sitting about this last few weeks and I don’t see why we can’t just delay the league and accept that there’ll be a crossover where we won’t have county players, but then maybe have them for the second half of your league and get a good bit of prep for championship.
“County players should play with the club. We don’t want to go on a rugby route, where you lose touch with your club,” says the Donegal U20 coach, a setup that released players outside the starting group back for club games this year too.
In Derry, Fionntan Devlin felt there was no need to have a club season starting in March. Between pre-season competitions, 13 league games and at least seven in championship for almost everybody, there’s plenty of football.
Yet so much of it means so little.
“Tyrone are probably getting it closer to a split season than Derry are, and other counties as well.
“What was the need in Derry to be playing league football in March? I don’t understand it.
“The way that Derry’s format is, it doesn’t lend itself to shortening your season, it’s gonna expand it.
“It’s about starting leagues later, not earlier. That would lend itself better to the split season.
“Derry are going the opposite way - they’re nearly colliding with the county season rather than trying to stay away from it.”
