KILLINAN END - Hurling’s revolutionary teams deserved better

A few voices were heard around the time of the Jubilee team celebrations in the summer agitating about the low-key nature of the acknowledgement for the teams involved.

In 2022 it was unusual in that there were two teams because of the inability to give the 1996 Wexford team their due at the time. Low-key it certainly was which given that there was no curtain-raiser to the final was entirely predictable. How could it have been otherwise in the circumstances? Whether it was avoidable is another matter.

The time in which Wexford and Clare won those finals had been described as a Golden Era though the precise criteria for this claim are unclear. It certainly was unusual. For five seasons, 1994-98, the All-Ireland title went to counties outside the three most successful teams traditionally. Four of the five years saw a unique All-Ireland final pairing – and a quarter of a century on, three of these four pairings – Offaly-Limerick, Clare-Offaly, and Clare-Tipperary, remain once-offs. The Wexford-Kilkenny Leinster Final of 1997 saw the biggest attendance at a Leinster Final since the same counties played in the same fixture 40 years earlier. By several criteria it certainly was a time when there was something special in the air. If hurling lacks something as a sport, it is variety and unpredictability, and these years provided that and more.

There is a slight difference between the two years in which Wexford and Clare won those finals. In 1996 when Martin Storey lifted the MacCarthy Cup, the All-Ireland championship was old-style – the last of them. You got one shot, and barring a replay, if you failed to win that was that. By the dawn of 1997, for better or for worse, provincial runners-up in Munster and Leinster would be given a second opportunity to redeem themselves.

To an extent this can be traced back to the anomaly of Galway’s situation in the championship. Back in the 1950s there was a certain madness in allowing Galway free passage to the 1955 and 1958 finals. The next solution was to put Galway into the Munster championship where they struggled with just one win (over Clare) in eleven seasons. One of the problems was that Galway were not good enough. From the mid-‘70s on, perhaps the issue was that they were too good. Too good for other counties to watch and be happy that Galway had the advantage of safe passage to the latter stages of the championship. Too good for Galway themselves to not have the advantage of competitive games to hone their game to the levels required for consistent success.

Yet, since Liam Mulvihill had become Ard-Stiúrthóir of the GAA in 1979, change to the championship was a prospect he had raised quietly several times. By the time the 1990s arrived, if it was a new proposal, it was certainly not a new idea. Perhaps this was the ideal time for it when the ground was at its most fertile. After all, Offaly had won the 1994 All-Ireland final, with Clare winning a year later. Was there was a point in the previous century where such counties would have less to fear if meeting a traditional foe a second time? Maybe the more successful counties - at that time having fallen on hard times – looked on it as a way of bolstering themselves against defeats to resurgent counties like Offaly and Clare.

Allowing only the provincial runners-up a second chance was as conservative as change can be. The ultimate put-down in those years was that you were coming through the back-door, though of course it was not beyond a winning captain to remind people that they were going out the front door. Banter is not what it used to be. It was 2002 when the whole house was thrown open leading us to the new system that was unleashed in 2018.

Whatever has come in the meantime, it will be hard to beat that initial 1997 championship for wildness. Clare won the Munster Final in a strange game against Tipperary in Páirc Uí Chaoimh. Strange in that Clare built up a substantial lead, 0-10 to 0-2 at one point, yet ended up level as the game ebbed towards a close, relying on a close call from a scuffed John Leahy ground stroke at the Blackrock End to avoid a replay. They did of course get a replay of sorts when the teams met again in the All-Ireland final. In the first four years of the new system provincial finals were repeated three times in the All-Ireland final. In the intervening 22 championships it has happened also just three times showing the impact of an open system.

The rematch of Clare and Tipp in Croke Park took place 25 years ago this week. It was a day when Tipp might have snatched an improbable win with a couple of goals from Liam Cahill and Eugene O’Neill putting them ahead late on despite being 0-17 to 0-12 down with ten minutes left. Points from Ollie Baker and Jamesie O’Connor sealed it for Clare before John Leahy almost won it for Tipp with a late goal chance. It was not quite the classic final of Ger Loughnane’s imagination, but it was hectic. Clare deserved to win that All-Ireland championship even if some of the needless controversies and paranoia of that year foreshadowed their downfall a year later. Certainly, they and their Wexford counterparts deserved their day in the sun and a more appropriate setting.