A novice’s guide to the 2014 All-Ireland Hurling Final
A novice’s guide to the 2014 All-Ireland Hurling Final
A crash course for newcomers, foreigners and passive Sky Sports watchers
A crash course on Ireland’s native game for passive Sky Sports viewers
First things first: what is hurling?
Well, that’s a simple question with no simple answer.
On a fundamental level, hurling is a field sport — the fastest in the world — with similarities to hockey and lacrosse. It’s played on a rectangular field by two teams of 15 players, in a 70-minute game split into two equal halves. Each end of a pitch has goalposts similar to those of rugby; players score by hitting the ball between the posts and over the crossbar for one point, or under the crossbar for a goal (worth three points).
Each player is armed with a hurl made of ash wood, which is used to strike the sliotar, a hard, leather, tennis-sized ball. (Despite misconceptions, it’s not for use against opponents!) The ball cannot be thrown, or carried for any longer than four steps — instead a player has to balance the ball on the end of their hurl as they run.
But to the Irish, hurling is far more than a pitch and a set of playing rules. Through Hibernian eyes, when played well, hurling is the greatest sport on the Earth: the physical manifestation of Irishness itself. It’s a game that’s been played for centuries (and possibly longer), native to these shores, and the day of the All-Ireland Hurling Final is something of an international holiday for the Irish worldwide.
In fact, in Ireland there’s a saying:
The men of Ireland were hurling when the gods of Greece were young.
Through the eyes of a foreigner, hurling is a frenetic, energetic and barely-regulated riot… but a brilliant one. And because this season is the first time that games have been broadcast live on Sky Sports, there’s been a growing audience to take it in.
And today’s the final?
Yes. Imagine what the English football season would be like if there were no domestic leagues or European competition, and the most prominent competition was the FA Cup. The All-Ireland Championship in hurling (and in Gaelic Football, hurling’s sister sport, which is also run by the GAA) would have a similar social status, perhaps elevated even higher.
The Championship is mostly a straightforward knock-out competition, with three components. There are four provinces in Ireland but the standard of hurling in Connacht (the west) and Ulster (the north) is weak, so the best teams from those provinces participate in the Leinster Championship (in the east). The quality in Munster (the south) is good enough to keep its competitive borders intact, and indeed the five participating counties in Munster are all so strong that virtually every game in the Munster championship is an epic.
The winners of the Leinster and Munster championships each qualify for the semi-finals of the self-explanatory All-Ireland Championship. The other teams go into a qualifier series, popularly known as the ‘back door’, where they play off against each other in a staggered series of elimination games until another two semi-finalists have been found. The semi-finals and final itself are played in Croke Park in north inner city Dublin.
Croke Park? I’ve heard of that place.
As well you might. Croke Park (capacity 82,300) is one of Europe’s biggest stadiums — and is to Gaelic Games as Wembley is to English football. It’s considered something of a holy place for devotees to the sports, and given how inherently Irish those sports are, it’s also a national sporting cathedral.
This was a point of controversy a few years ago, when Lansdowne Road was being redeveloped, leaving the national soccer and rugby teams homeless. The GAA’s rule book bans the use of association property for ‘foreign games’ (usually interpreted as soccer, rugby, cricket and hockey), and so without another major stadium anywhere within Ireland, the international sides in other codes faced the prospect of having to play their ‘home’ matches in Scotland or Wales. After a lengthy process of navel-gazing, the GAA’s annual conference ultimately decided that allowing rival sports to use its prize asset was a lesser crime than forcing Irishmen of other sports to travel abroad for their home matches.
The move was generally accepted to be an overwhelming success: the rugby team were gracious visitors who memorably thrashed England on their first visit, while the soccer team’s visits coincided with a slide into mediocrity that often left the enormous stadium barely half-full. The GAA got a nice PR bounce, global exposure, and tidy fees for stadium rental.
Who’s playing?
Well, that’s part of what makes this year’s final such a mouth-watering prospect. Kilkenny versus Tipperary is hurling’s version of el Clásico — a less bilious version of the Old Firm. In a country of 32 counties, these two have won 60 of the previous 125 Championships. (Cork, who lost to Tipperary in the semi-final, account for another 30.)
Kilkenny, in black and amber stripes, have won nine of the last fifteen All-Irelands — all of them under the same manager, Brian Cody, the Alex Ferguson of hurling. Kilkenny is a county stuffed with hurlers — no other sport is played with nearly as much enthusiasm — and although there will always be natural quality, Cody turns good players into great ones, and great ones into awesome ones. In the 2008 final, Kilkenny gave a display so close to perfection that Cody himself was given the Man of the Match award.
After having a poor 2013 — going out early in Leinster, and with an ageing squad failing to make it through the qualifier series — the Cats will feel that they have something to prove: that their bodies, ageing as they may be, still have the atoms of champions.
Of particular note this year is the role of Henry Shefflin. If Cody is Kilkenny’s Alex Ferguson, Shefflin is both its Ryan Giggs and its Eric Cantona — he’s been the lynchpin for all of Cody’s Championship victories, though at 35 and overcoming his second cruciate ligament injury, he has played only a substitute’s role in what is likely to be his final season. That aside, his occasional appearances have been golden, and there is a growing sense that given the sheer pace of the sport, it may be more useful to have a team’s best 15 players active at the end of the game rather than at the start. His mere presence is enough to throw an opponent off their game: he will attract opposing defenders simply to create space for his own colleagues. If Kilkenny win, Shefflin will become the first player in the history of the sport to have won ten All-Ireland medals; even if they are beaten, he will still be remembered as one of the game’s all-time greatest.
On the other side are Tipperary, wearing blue with a band of gold. Under Eamon O’Shea, Tipp are a (generally) younger team whose best days ought to be ahead of it. Were Kilkenny not so dominant over the last decade, the chances are Tipperary would be the modern day superpower — having won one title in 2010, and losing the deciders of 2009 and 2011. Star players like Lar Corbett and Seamus Callinan would destroy most defenders; with Kilkenny’s backs running into their final years, tomorrow could be the turning point of the era.
By the way, those finals that Tipp lost in 2009 and 2011? Those were to Kilkenny, in a magnificient trilogy of deciders that caught the public imagination like few before them. Kilkenny’s win in 2009 made them only the second team in history to win four titles in a row; the Premier County’s revenge in 2010 denied them a historic quintet. Kilkenny, almost out of spite, came back to unseat Tipp in the 2011 final before demolishing them in the 2012 semi-final on the way to yet another crown.
Since then the sides have had another couple of marathon meetings — in the final of the 2013 National Hurling League (the secondary competition played between February and April), in the 2013 qualifier series at Kilkenny’s home ground of Nowlan Park, and again in the 2014 League final which Kilkenny nabbed after extra time. Tipp don’t often lose so many games in sequence — and they’ll feel they’re due a win by now.
Sounds good.
So today will almost inevitably mark the end of some era, one way or another. Kilkenny won’t consider themselves over the hill if they’re beaten, but many neutral observers will; today is likely to be the last we’ll see of Henry Shefflin, who surely can’t make it through another winter. It may also be the last we see of Brian Cody, who is now 60 and had a triple by-pass in April 2013.
Tipperary, on the other hand, will feel like they’ve spent long enough in preparation for an era of dominance: the bulk of the squad are now in the physical prime of their mid-20s, and having been pipped by Kilkenny so regularly for so long, will be gunning for a dominance that they’ll feel is long overdue.
So the 2014 All-Ireland Hurling Final could be the changing of the guard, with old men disposed of and young men taking power — or it could yet be the sweetest win of many Kilkenny careers.
Postscript: the players aren’t paid — the GAA is a strictly amateur organisation, albeit one run by professionals. Tickets to the final cost €80 but all of the GAA’s income, after running costs, go back towards the promotion of the game in communities across Ireland and internationally.
The players, meanwhile, will take Monday off — but most will be back at work on Tuesday, as teachers, police officers, bank officials or workmen. Just another day; just another game; just another season, and another always around the corner.