Fitzpatrick: At last, it's all on the line

Paul Fitzpatrick

Can one fixture rescue a season which is in danger of losing its way? Maybe. After a drab quarter-final weekend, the draw on Sunday evening, pitting Crosserlough and Gowna together and Kingscourt against Killygarry or Cuchulainns, has whetted the appetite.

Based on feedback from clubs, Cavan tweaked their championship structure for this year but it didn’t go far enough. We play 24 matches to eliminate four teams from the Senior Championship; there is no doubt that a plebiscite of football followers would identify at least two of those four before the competition starts each year. A kind description for that is that it’s a marathon, not a sprint; if it’s an unkind one you’re after, we’ll let you come up with it yourself.

Jeopardy is the lifeblood of all sporting competitions and in Cavan, there just isn’t enough of it - and it’s unrealistic to expect things to catch light the instant the group stage ends. In 10 years, only one team – Cootehill Celtic in 2019 – secured four points and failed to advance to the knock-out stages. The upshot is that teams know if they win their first two matches, they are extremely unlikely to be eliminated regardless of what happens thereafter. That lends itself to something which is universally unwanted: dead rubbers.

Throw in the fact that there is little incentive to finish higher up the table – there are numerous examples of teams landing an ‘easier’ quarter-final draw after losing in round four than they would have had they won – and we can say with a degree of certainty that the important thing, perhaps the only thing that matters at all, is to still be standing at the end of the group stage.

And all of that – the competition being too forgiving for too long, essentially - makes group form notoriously unreliable.

While the eventual championship winners do tend to finish towards the top of the table, we would argue that this is correlation rather than causation. Let’s face it: the best teams in the county are going to win the majority of their matches regardless of the format and just because they tend to win most group games doesn’t mean the structure itself is optimal.

Cavan football, we would argue, would be better served by reducing the number of senior clubs to 10 and probably to eight, but as we know, turkeys don’t exercise their mandate to end up on a baking tray…

As we write, 12 has been reduced to five but this year’s riddle has been especially tricky to solve. Drawing reliable lines of form from the group stage was nigh on impossible; no team won all four matches and only one went unbeaten. Once two wins were accrued, players were rested, squads rotated.

Even some of the more eye-catching results came with a health warning. Crosserlough were lucky to beat Arva, for example, and then played Gowna three days later, the lack of recovery and preparation time putting an asterisk beside that game before a ball was even kicked.

Three of the six matches in round four were effectively meaningless, which further muddied the waters.

For the last few years, since the novelty of the current structure wore off and teams learned how to – not ‘game’ the system exactly but understandably work it as best they can – it has become increasingly clear that the championship truly starts at the quarter-final stage.

By then, the chaff has been separated from the wheat. It’s knock-out football, there are no safety nets and, finally, it’s all on the line. It was very disappointing, then, that last weekend produced such poor fare, Friday evening (Killygarry v Cuchulainns) excepted.

That match again showed the wisdom of Cavan county board’s policy of facilitating replays in the knock-out stages. Replays were always a popular tradition in Gaelic games – the late Eamonn Coleman was fond of saying that the best team always wins the replay – because they gave teams and their followers another day out and were lucrative at the gate. The board are right to allow teams another crack at it if it’s level first time out.

For those who like to place a wager on the draw – and the number of stalemate-backers has diminished since the bookies copped on and slashed the odds – the quarter-final stage, by the by, has traditionally been the time to make hay.

Strikingly, in the last 13 years there have been 12 drawn Senior Championship quarter-finals (including two in the Covid championship of 2020 which went to extra time but would have paid out as 60-minute draws).

The latest draw was a brilliant match but the remainder of the last-eight ties were forgettable. Ramor United and Mullahoran both performed very poorly – though victors Gowna and Crosserlough were impressive – while Kingscourt idled through the first half before pulling away against a Cavan Gaels side who are rebuilding.

So, a championship which promised much and delivered a number of excellent contests – Crosserlough v Arva, Cuchulainns v Ramor, Ballyhaise v Castlerahan, Ballyhaise v Ramor and Crosserlough v Kingscourt come to mind – wobbled badly in round four, partly through the self-inflicted wound of the structure, and then again in the quarter-finals.

What it needs now is a jolt of electricity and the semi-final draw may just have provided it, principally with the pairing of two of the county’s storied clubs.

Crosserlough and Gowna have met in three championship semi-finals, two group matches and one league final since 2021. Gowna have won all six, at times leaving patchy form behind them and rising to the occasion superbly.

That back story means the hype will build itself for this match. Crosserlough have achieved too much to have anything left to prove about their quality but, if this generation is ultimately to be remembered as a great team, they simply cannot keep losing the biggest matches to their bitter rivals.

Gowna, meanwhile, are desperate to return to the throne, particularly after the chastening final defeat to Kingscourt last year.

The future, we wrote in the week they beat the Stars by 17 points in the 2023 final, promised riches. If they go a third successive year without bringing Oliver Plunkett back to the lough shore, those riches will begin to look like fool’s gold. The other semi-final will either be a repeat of the 2015 penultimate-round clash between Kingscourt and Killygarry or a first SFC semi-final between Kingscourt and Cuchulainns. Either way, there is a novelty factor.

The champions, with talisman Padraig Faulkner back from his travels, will start as favourites but their opponents, whoever they are, will know that the window of opportunity is agape. This is the real business now. Followers have spent seven weeks trying to decipher meaning from results which often didn’t matter all that much but now that there are five teams left – and soon to be four – the consequences of losing, and the prize for winning, are enormous.

After a marathon designed to keep almost everyone alive, we have finally reached the sprint; one wrong step and it’s over. Either the senior champions will return to the final, or last year’s intermediate winners, or a Killygarry side who could finally be fulfilling their potential. Any of those storylines would bring colour and no little intrigue.

As for Gowna v Crosserlough? That game will provide answers, definitively, as the best championship matches should.

Bring it on.