KILLINAN END - New versus the Old
Tipp’s county hurling championship has thrown up a remarkable amount of new final pairings in recent decades when you consider the traditional difficulty of new winners emerging. Three of the last four finals have seen first time pairings and going back a little further, finals such as Sarsfields v Loughmore and Sarsfields v Drom have happened just a couple of times. This is despite the relative strength of those clubs over an extended period of time. Nenagh have played in four finals over the past twenty years and had a different opponent each time. Kiladangan stand on the threshold of a similar experience this year. Last year we had a fourth different champion in four years, something not seen since the early 1990s, and not for half a century before that. It is an exclusive club no matter what way you look at it.
Consideration of County Finals in these terms magnifies what is about to happen in Cork. Blackrock and St Finbarr’s will square up at Páirc Uí Chaoímh in the Cork County final for the first time since 1982. There will be hullabulloo about this pairing of traditional city rivals just as there was when Blackrock and Glen Rovers met two years ago bridging a gap all the way back to 1978 – an even longer hiatus in one of the major County Final pairings.
This raises the impossible to answer question of whether this is a good or bad thing. Is a county healthier if there are different teams coming through regularly or does it need a dominant team or two setting standards. Does it matter at all in the context of a county team? Galway’s champions won 12 All-Ireland club titles courtesy of six clubs in between the county team’s success in 2017 after a wait of 29 years. Competitive clubs seemed to do little to lift the inter-county boat. Tipp’s champion teams have found the All-Ireland championship to be barren ground for decades yet the county team has fared reasonably well. The connection between the two is not obvious from those two counties.
Contrary evidence can be found though. Back in the 1970s when Cork hurling was in the ascendancy at inter-county level the county’s clubs also led the way. Of the ten All-Ireland club titles contested in that decade only two were not won by Cork clubs. At the same time the Cork county team won seven Munster championships and four All-Irelands. You could thus argue that the relative decline of the Cork team’s success and the fate of their clubs are connected. That is of course influenced by where you stand on the question of what determines the strength of club hurling in a county. Is it that one or maybe two very strong clubs drive a county team? Or in a county like Cork with clubs in every nook and cranny does it matter where the 15 or 20 come from?
In the 1977 All-Ireland hurling final, eight players from St Finbarr’s and Blackrock saw service for Cork – five of them were All-Stars that year. On that September day, few would have brooked argument on the value of these clubs to the Cork cause. Certainly, they are two of the three traditional clubs that have dominated the Cork county championship, along with Glen Rovers. Blackrock have 33 County titles, St Finbarr’s 25 – impressive totals even in a national context, and in a local Cork setting sees them miles ahead of any other clubs bar Glen Rovers who have won 27. The curiosity of Blackrock-St Finbarr’s is that despite the vast number of championships they have won, County finals between the two are surprisingly rare.
In that aforementioned golden period for Cork hurling the clubs met in four County finals between 1971 and 1982. We grew up with the notion that this is how it ever was. Yet, it is hard to imagine that the 1971 final between the clubs was their first encounter in a final since 1929. Looked at through another lens it means that the final coming up will be just the fifth time they have played in a final in over ninety years. For all the tradition that seems to drip off this game it is a not the enduring consistent story that one might have imagined.
You have to go back to 1993 since St Finbarr’s won a Cork county senior hurling title. For a club such as that it must seem an eternity, yet it has symbolised the changing nature of club hurling in Cork. This year will see a winner from the traditional ‘Big 3’ for just the sixth time in that three decades. St Finbarr’s success rate has declined but the others have had to make do with reduced rations too. It is still fair going given the challenges for the GAA in urban settings to produce two County finalists from the city but as with the Blackrock-Glen pairing of a couple of years ago, this is likely to be a once-off rather than a sure sign that power has shifted back to the city. The matter of whether that is good or bad is, of course, one of conjecture and opinion.