My column in The Kerryman. 13 November, 2013
Sports fans can be divided into two types, those who prefer the best and those who prefer the underdog. I love the best, so despite this being the best All Ireland Hurling Championship ever, I still feel a little let down as Kilkenny were beaten. I also feel privileged to have been alive during the pomp of the greatest team to have ever hurled, so I’m not too disheartened.
In fact I’ve been spoiled by these last ten years and what’s amazing is that I can look forward to being even more spoiled for the next ten years. In this post-Kilkenny era, there are now eight counties (including Kilkenny) who harbour realistic ambitions of winning the McCarthy Cup. Eight counties! Never has hurling been so competitive.
So when my father taps me on the shoulder for my annual lotto and membership money for Lixnaw Hurling Club, I’ll be even more enthusiastic than usual. It’s like a tax, but a tax I don’t mind paying as it goes to hurling. It means that as I watched Lixnaw in the County Championship this year and Clare win the All Ireland, I knew that in my tiny way, I helped. I helped fund the joyous spectacle that is hurling played on stages, small and large.
It’s a very tiny contribution when compared to the countless volunteers who keep hurling going. Tiny compared to the boys and girls, men and women, who commit themselves to training regimes of unrelenting toughness. All to play a game where the only guaranteed return is abuse from fat men like me and being rained on. Not that I hold with the idea of hurling being better than soccer. One may as well argue that blue is better than red.
The only real difference, a vital difference, is that hurling requires nurturing in a way soccer doesn’t. Soccer’s strength is it’s simplicity. Hurling requires an investment of time, expertise and money and again time. It’s too complex and too rare to ever be left to survive organically.
So when we celebrate the new openness of the Championship we must still think of those teams outside the top eight. There’s Wexford and Offaly. They teeter on the brink of being cut adrift, but they’ve a culture of hurling that makes their return to the elite, realistic.
Behind them are Carlow, Antrim, Laois and Westmeath, who are doing so much to try bridging that gulf between them and the very best. Then there’s Christy Ring Cup holders Kerry. I fear the big-ball game has such a strangle hold on this county, that adding to our 1891 title is getting less, rather than more likely.
That’s why it’s important that the top eight don’t circle their wagons. Without regular contact with the best players the game has to offer, second tier teams will be forever condemned to the second tier.
That’s beyond disheartening, it’s wrong. The attempt to keep hurling alive and make it thrive outside the heartlands of the game is being made by people who love the game in a way that can only be deflated and defeated by the game itself turning its back on them. An eighth team elite is tempting, but a top 14 helps guarantee the game’s future. Nothing is more important than that.
