The only thing confirmed last week was the level of unpredictability that lies ahead.
And that thankfully, is even ignoring Covid for once.
The results were more akin to pre-season cup competitions than they were the penultimate round of National League games.
There was a collective dusting off of cobwebs evident and right across the divisions there were eyebrow-raising performances at odds with previous results in this year’s league.
If a week is a long time in politics, seven months of inter-county inactivity seems a serious spell time in sport.
Players will have found (and lost) form with their clubs.
For many players it will have been their longest spell away from the county environment.
Picking up where they left off was never really an option.
A case in point is Mayo’s result last week against Galway which demonstrated perfectly how all our notes from the early season may as well be discarded to the bin.
Galway, flying high at the start of the year, turned in, what Padraig Joyce bluntly described as the worst performance from a Galway team he has ever been involved with as player or manager.
Mayo on the other hand are ready to unfurl their ‘Mayo for Sam’ banners again such was the power of their performance.
Tyrone have already shown this year the folly of predicting a result based on the previous week when turning over Dublin one week after collapsing against Galway.
We are usually very quick to judge in the GAA and especially so regarding team’s chances or otherwise.
We must put these urges on hold for now and, possibly, for the rest of this truncated season.
Winter conditions, condensed and incomplete preparations, unsettled teams, new rules and Covid-induced disruptions are but a few of the mitigating circumstances that make judging any player or team purely on what the next several weeks entail look unreasonable.
For a start, there is simply the timing of everything.
Discombobulated is a rare word but rarer still in its association with the GAA calendar, which, despite its many problems, usually displays a rhythm and timing as familiar to us as the seasons.
Yet that sense of disorientation is there.
I can imagine, within the inter-county set-ups there is a strange atmosphere where the usual ramping up of training intensity to Championship mode is being carried out at the time of year when all natural urges and cues are to wind things down.
Outside of their county team bubbles, with lockdowns becoming widespread, the shutters feel as if they are slowly being pulled down for the year.
For teams to be pushing against all of this in a bid to recapture their best form is a big ask.
Amazingly we are only eight days out from Championship.
The contrast from a normal year is stark.
The weekend before a big Championship match can often involve travelling away for a preparation weekend.
The bus journey, the hotel stay, the endless meetings, training and recovery sessions and the R&R time all spent in each other’s company preparing body and minds for the big game.
The whole idea is a bit of concentrated fine tuning to finalise preparations.
Instead this weekend, players will jump into their cars to travel across the country for respective league fixtures.
Teams are a long way from ‘final preparations’ yet still have important games to negotiate before they can start to focus in on Championship.
The amount up for grabs this weekend has been well documented already. It will only be natural for teams and management to have somewhat of a split focus.
Championship is the natural priority yet the importance of league standings has risen significantly.
Where each team competes in a 2021 campaign that is strangely only months away is of critical importance.
Consequently, I don’t see any choice for the likes of Armagh, Tyrone, Monaghan, Cavan and Antrim, than to go all out this weekend.
They can take some comfort from the fact that, while their counterparts in Derry, Down, Donegal and Fermanagh may have, on the face of it, more room to focus on Championship preparations that too is not an easy situation to manage.
At the very least the games are a distraction from such preparation.
Players playing watching themselves can play very poorly and a shocker of a team or personal performance is not the way to come into a big game.
Resting players from a team that badly needs game time together isn’t ideal either while the notion of being able to play at a slightly lower level then turn it on when you want is always a dangerous one.
From a Tyrone point of view the likely approach should be obvious.
Mickey Harte’s oft stated desire to win all games is one thing.
Another is that some of his greatest managerial triumphs have come when week-on-week games have had to be embraced.
Rather than fatigue inducing, regular competitive games are the fastest route to form for teams who embrace them the right way.
There will still of course be tricky decisions to be made.
Take that player with a tight hamstring – playable but with risk of aggravating or even tearing.
Do you save them for Championship or is the result this weekend and game time worth the risk?
No matter what teams do however we will not get a complete picture this weekend.
They are stand-alone matches with no influence outside the important matter of Sunday evenings league tables.
Their predictive value beyond that is zero.
In keeping with the year that it has been, the 2020 inter-county season will be one of uncertainty where old norms have been done away and where unpredictability is everywhere.
From a societal point of view, it’s a bleak combination to live with.
Ironically, for sports however, they are exactly the ingredients you want.
