A long road that has no turning

KILLINAN END

Nothing demonstrates hurling as a game of snakes and ladders quite like the club scene. Mullinahone’s glory day came in 2002, when Thurles Sarsfields were beaten in a replay. Less than a quarter of a century on, Mullinahone have diced with relegation to the second tier. Their partners in that dance of death could hardly, in the grand scheme of things, have been more illustrious.

If Mullinahone were the one team from the South to scale the summit since the days of Carrick Davins, then the team which replaced Davins as champions back in the ’60s was the men in red from the northeast of the county. In doing so, Roscrea launched a period of extraordinary plenty for North Tipp. Some sixteen of the next twenty county titles went North, with ten finals being all-North affairs. Roscrea survive to maintain a storied name in the Dan Breen race, while Mullinahone tumble down the ladder to Premier Intermediate, where they will form an intimidating presence. They will be replaced by another South team, with Killenaule and St Mary’s doing battle for the final place in the Dan Breen shake-up next year.

We saw a similar example of what time can do in the case of Cashel, who, though well beaten by an excellent Nenagh performance in the quarter-final, have made terrific progress in recent years. They too had lean years after the remarkable sunshine days of the early ’90s, Still, they had reason to be philosophical about their fate over the years; after all, Kiltormer, the team that defeated them in the All-Ireland semi-final replay, now operates at junior level in Galway. Their beaten Munster final opponents, Midleton, are in great shape these days, facing into a semi-final with the famous Glen Rovers next weekend. That was the same team they beat in the 1991 Cork County Final shortly before that Munster final encounter with Cashel. Yet it was a long road back to raising the Seán Óg Murphy Cup in 2013.

Galway’s last eight in the championship includes previous All-Ireland champions in Sarsfields and Athenry, both of which have fallen on hard times. Sarsfields have just a single county senior title since the 1990s – that won in 2015. Athenry’s golden years were certainly of the 24-carat variety; a dozen county senior hurling finals were contested in eighteen seasons between 1987 and 2004, with eight of them won. Given the challenge of such a competitive championship as Galway’s, their local record reflects as much credit on them as anything they won at national level. St Thomas’, All-Ireland champions as recently as 2024, failed to reach the last eight of the current Galway championship.

An interesting development in Galway was the dispensing with the Senior B grade and simply referring to the tier below Senior – which currently includes Portumna – as Intermediate. Another county which keeps things simple in this respect is Kilkenny, with the Senior-Intermediate-Junior model. That county’s competition has an odd championship structure in that a lot of matches are played at senior level in two round-robin groups, which, for the majority of teams, decides merely at what point they enter the knockout stages. For the unfortunate teams to finish bottom of those groups, the spectre of relegation looms.

It could be argued that a system like this creates a lot of games of not much consequence. Shamrocks Ballyhale have a bit of a history over the years of not setting the world on fire in the round-robin but coming good when it matters. Yet, with that county being what it is, not all matches need enormous consequences, as there is considerable appetite for watching the local club championship. It also ensures that all teams are tried and tested by the time they potentially have to face the trapdoor.

That county’s intermediate grade features one of the biggest scalps of all in the context of big names falling on hard times. James Stephens – multiple All-Ireland winners in the past – currently endure a second consecutive season in the middle grade. From the moment they dropped, they were red-hot favourites to return with immediate effect but were beaten by Danesfort in last year’s county final. The city team might reassess things on realising that their conquerors last year will make an immediate return, having lost a relegation play-off with Erin’s Own Castlecomer.

Danesfort have won two Intermediate Championships in recent years but have been relegated three times this decade, including the years directly after winning the Intermediate, a fate that also affected Lisdowney, the 2024 champions. Promotion, should it happen, might have no further guarantees for James Stephens. The road could be slippery.

In our own county, the return of Moycarkey/Borris to county final day bridges the gap all the way back to centenary year, an era when the Mid team did so well, winning two county titles and the Munster championship. The old seanfhocal might apply: “Is fada an bóthar nach mbíonn casadh ann” – it’s a long road that has no turning.