The greatest show: Munster hurling championship has become the best competition in Irish sport
IF YOU WANT to antagonise many football fans past a certain age all you have to do is invoke something as being the best this or record that of the Premier League era. As if nothing happened before August 1992.
Some things did change then – mainly around the sums of money it cost to watch football or what you might expect to be paid to play it at this level.
The league and the game remained substantively the same, though. Similar teams, similar number of games. Even the name of it was just the old one replaced by a French word for the same thing. Rebrand? Mange tout! This time next year we’ll be billionaires.
A more dramatic change has taken place on our doorstep in recent years. The Munster senior hurling championship got a round robin format in 2018. It would be inaccurate to say this world was never the same again – because Covid managed to scuff up the championships of 2020 and 2021 along with a lot else – but the change has been pronounced, the results awesome.
Simply, the Munster championship has gone from being a storied but second-fiddle affair in the backdoor era to a different thing entirely. It is now placed somewhere between the best competition in Irish sport and the monumental battle scene at the end of the Lord of the Rings.
If you are a homesick emigrant in the west of the USA or the east of Australia and can make it back for a couple of weeks every couple of years, then you want to be timing it for late April, early May now instead of December. How could you expect the magic of Christmas to compare to a full Limerick, Páirc or Thurles with two points on the line?
These games are the best of us. Season after season delivers a number of breathtaking contests, and a classic or two into the bargain.
Following last year’s Cork-Limerick round-robin game in Páirc Úi Chaomh I told my colleagues in the office here that nothing we’d see for the rest of 2024 in Irish sport would beat that by way of spectacle. They naturally said this was hyperbole; just seenism. The All-Ireland series, not to mind the Olympics, would soon supplant the memory of this game which helped one side move into pole position for the third qualifying spot from a province.
I stood by my outrageous claim then, as I do now. The ebb and flow of the match in Cork that day; the power and potency of the Rebel attack in the first half, Limerick’s methodical and devastating comeback and Cork’s final, unlikely surge towards victory. All of this, allied to the supreme levels of conditioning and skill on show, was remarkable.
The setting and reaction of the supporters brought it to another place again. Sport at its best can take everybody present and remove thoughts of all else in the world. The more the scores and intensity ratcheted up, the more rapt the full house became, the heat haze over the Lee that evening giving everything an otherworldly glow.
Then the explosion of passion and relief when Cork got over the line gave graphic evidence as to what it meant to so many. Quite a few Cork supporters were even taken aback by their own reaction afterwards, unaware that such a seam of emotion existed; that it was in there all this time and now it was out there, among the noise of everybody else’s renewed joy.
It was what we might today call McIlroyesque. Events in Georgia on Sunday night mean we likely won’t deem anything that happens in the Munster championship this year the most vital Irish sporting event of 2025. But they could come a close second, third and fourth.
We’ve had many games for the ages in the past few years. The Limerick-Clare final in 2022 at Thurles ranks with any Munster decider from history for tension and deed. Their repeat for the next season’s decider was another spellbinder. Cork-Limerick and Clare-Cork in Croke Park last season were Munster championship games on tour.
Provincial championships are criticised, often rightly, for failing to pit even teams against each other in games of real consequence. That is something the Munster championship gets gloriously right in this iteration.
The level of the sides is so high, the gap from one to the next the width of a sparrow’s wing, or even the timing of a Sparrow’s flick.
Clare, All-Ireland champions last year, beat Waterford, who went out after the group stage by just one point in contentious circumstances. Cork, who lost to Clare in the All-Ireland final, got upended by Waterford. Cork, indeed, were crashing out but for late heroics from Shane Kingston and Patrick Horgan against Limerick. So marginal is the difference between progress and the exit door.
If there were any prior doubts about the format’s potential we were put on notice in 2018 when three of the 10 round robin games were draws. Perhaps the weekend when this thing really took off was 2 and 3 June that year when Cork and Limerick, who would later draw in regulation time in the All-Ireland semi-final, finished 1-25 to 0-28. The next day Waterford and Tipperary finished 2-22 apiece.
Draws like this straight away bring to mind Cork and Tipperary in 1987 and 91, Dublin and Meath in 91, Kildare-Meath in 97.
When you get All-Ireland contenders colliding in the provinces with everything on the line, and proving inseparable, it draws the eyes and imaginations of everybody with so much as a passing interest for sport.
Straight knockout systems were unfair in that they denied us great teams for the greater chunks of championships – but boy were they compelling.
The current Munster championship finds a way to get excellent teams playing each other in fast succession with so much at stake. It’s a tantalising look at what is possible in top level GAA by way of the structures which often mitigate against excitement.
When teams are so close narratives can change quickly. We know how it is now: Cork comingg in as league champions and being written up. Limerick are as close as they’ve been to under the radar since this time in 2018. Clare are on the back foot following Cork’s dismantling of their defence in last month’s league game in Ennis. Waterford are deemed as an improving outfit on the back of Division 1B success while doubts endure over Tippearary’s ability to carry their winter form into the summer, this being compounded by Cork’s free-scoring first half against them in the league final.
At least half of these assumptions will be dead come Sunday evening; the consensus will be broken and then reformed with every round of games.
Were two from three of the favourites to emerge from Munster – Cork, Clare and Limerick – to go out after the round robin then few would be shocked. Mild surprise, perhaps, but certainty, or anything close, does not apply.
This makes the Munster championship so watchable, and the teams so competitive after its completion.
A Munster team has won the Liam MacCarthy every season since the round robin began. Much of this is due to Limerick’s greatness, of course. Yet Clare and Tipperary have also emerged from Munster to win the All-Ireland that time.
Picking a winner in Munster should be a fool’s errand, yet Limerick have managed to win every one since 2019. If forced to make a prediction it would be for another Limerick win in 2025, with an almighty set of spills along the way. The only real shock would be a lacklustre, forgettable competition. Enjoy these for what they are: the best of days.
The 42
