KILLINAN END - Pulling their weight
The glory of the Munster championship, its packed crowds, its exciting matches, and its apparent competitiveness is indeed something to behold.
The competition has a storied past and much of that has revolved around specific rivalries and their competitiveness. Limerick-Cork in the 1940s, Tipperary-Cork in the 1950s/60s, and again in the 1980s/90s are obvious example of pairings which electrified the championship. All of this was premised on the expectation that the winners of Munster were likely All-Ireland champions as well. Yet, the Munster Final and its broader championship often relied on its tradition and sense of history to paper over mundane and predictable outcomes.
We all remember severe beatings for teams down the years in seasons where the Munster Final pairing was clear and obvious at the start of the championship. While a Limerick-Clare meeting three years running in a final is unusual indeed at least there was never a sense that it was more or less guaranteed in advance. This recurrent pairing is most interesting in the context of the new round-robin aspect of the competition which should root out shock results and by and large progress the ‘best’ teams. While drawing strong conclusions from small sets of data is ill-advised at the best of times it is tempting. The Munster championship’s apparent rude health makes you wonder can it all last? The competition thrives on all teams pulling their weight but the lessons of history tells us that this is not a given.
The group table of 2024 leaves Tipperary languishing at the bottom with Waterford just above them. The fortunes of these two counties seem to be the greatest existential threat to the excitement of the Munster Championship we have enjoyed in recent years. Can these counties continue to compete in a way that will ensure the health of the province into the future? Current and past evidence certainly legitimises the question. Let us consider the case of Waterford for now.
Competitiveness has never been a given for the Déise. Waterford played in the 1982 Munster Final having beaten Limerick in the semi-final. The outcome was disastrous. Cork won by 5-31 to 3-6. If the match were played under today’s conditions where scores can come from all angles all the time, and throwing of the ball is allowed and facilitated to speed up attacking opportunities, Cork would have had 5-31 by half-time. Waterford were administered an only slightly lower dose of the same medicine a year later in the Gaelic Grounds. Dark days for Waterford maybe but strangely this was actually in the midst of a sort of dawn for the county.
The really dark days might have been post-1967 when they managed to win just one Munster Championship game before that 1982 win over Limerick. Some fourteen championship seasons 1968-81 inclusive had seen just a single chink of light, that a shock result win over newly-minted and highly impressive League Champions Cork in 1974. The great Déise days of the late ’50 and early ‘60s had lifted many boats but time moved on and Waterford reverted to being uncompetitive. Their first All-Ireland win came in 1948 and considered in the context of the time looks as unlikely an All-Ireland win as ever happened. In the previous decade Waterford had won just two Munster Championship games, both in the same season when they reached the 1943 Munster Final. To be fair to Waterford it was a time when Munster teams won seven of the nine All-Irelands played so nothing was easy.
It is also important to remind ourselves of the unforgiving environment in the old knockout days when selectors and teams could change like the wind. Teams going did not always get a reasonable chance to develop or improve – many a championship team’s only outing together after limited preparation is now reflected in the black and white of a result on history’s pages. Nuances or explanations are lost to posterity.
Those days are past, but modernity too writes mixed reviews. Waterford’s experience since the new championship started in 2018 is a concern. Their first manager of that period, Páraic Fanning oversaw eight games with no win in two seasons. Waterford’s current manager, Davy Fitzgerald, has also been at the helm for two seasons - played eight won two are the raw takeaways on that. In between, the much-maligned Liam Cahill constructed a most respectable record. He was manager for fourteen games of which the Déise won seven, including beating Cork, Tipperary, Kilkenny, Galway, and Clare. Of the seven they lost four were to Limerick – who is innocent of that charge?
Outside the Liam Cahill era Waterford have just two wins in sixteen games in Munster. To what extent the Cahill period may have benefitted from the lack of a round-robin for two years is unknowable but there is enough in Waterford’s record in the other years and in their under-age struggles to be concerned about their longer-term vitality. The implications of that for the Munster championship into the future are not positive.