Fitzpatrick: Nothing lasts forever in the club football pecking order

Paul Fitzpatrick

You often don’t realise an athlete is past it until it’s too late. We’ve all seen footballers, club or county, who stay on too long and are reduced to a King Canute tribute act, vainly trying to hold back the waves.

The music still quickens their pulse but their feet can no longer keep time to the beat. The caustic judges on the terrace will declare that “their legs are gone”, like boxing commentators when a fighter’s knees buckle. In the ring, that usually ends in a knock-out. Figuratively speaking, much the same is true on the pitch.

If that’s true for players, it stands to reason that it applies to teams, too. Each has a life cycle and the difficulty is recognising when one is ending and another beginning.

In club championships across the country, it has been a season of shocks, as was the case in the provincials and All-Ireland series, lending further credence to the theory that nobody has fully got their head around the new rules yet. In this period of flux, there will be surprises, some the result of smart coaches making gains amid the confusion and others, we presume, down to the increased value of luck – the bounce of the ball – in the new game.

In Cavan, however, the Senior Championship final has a very familiar look. The big day will see a repeat of last year’s final fixture between Kingscourt Stars and Gowna, two of the modern-day giants of Cavan club football.

Two tribes who come from opposite ends of the county and very different places, their stories are intertwined through football. Kingscourt, a bustling town and hub of local industry on the fringes of Meath and Monaghan, and Gowna, a rural village on the shores of the lake bisected by the Longford border, brought together by a love of the game and the pursuit of excellence at it.

It has led to a shared history. Kingscourt made the final in 1980, having contested just one senior final in the previous six decades, and won it. Gowna, reformed in the 1970s, were still junior at the time but made their first Senior Championship decider eight years later – true to form, they won too.

Few could have predicted at the end of the 1970s that, of the following 46 Senior Championship finals, only 15 would not feature either Gowna or Kingscourt.

Along with Cavan Gaels, they make up the holy trinity of Cavan club football over the last five decades. On just five occasions since 1980 has there been a county final without at least one member of that triumvirate.

You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone, though – you just never know, not till it’s too late anyway. Kingscourt went 17 years without a title from 1993; Gowna’s famine stretched to 20 seasons.

At one stage, it felt like the Gaels would reign forever yet their time ended, too. The club played in every county final bar one from 2000 to 2015 and now haven’t been in one in a decade. The cliché tells us that they are ‘in transition’ now but what team isn’t? What Cavan Gaels are is living in a new reality.

Throw in the demographic change in their catchment area and the Cavan Town men have faced challenges but have risen to meet them commendably. Their baseline remains the last eight, having been there every year since 2016. That is no small thing.

The county championship, we like to think, is a riddle and the final provides the solution. Who solves it is a debate for another day – next week, maybe – but at this point one thing appears certain: the talk of a ‘big three’ from only a season or two ago has been smashed into smithereens. Just when we thought we had figured it out, the landscape has changed.

The leading trio from 2020 to 2024 was Gowna, Ramor United and Crosserlough. Between them, they won all five county championships and all five Division 1 leagues in that period; all three also made the semi-finals of the Senior Championship each year from 2022 to 2025 inclusive.

And then, Kingscourt’s emphatic win in last year’s county final broke that hegemony to some extent. The Stars, fiercely proud of their record, never bought into the ‘big three’ chatter in any case, but it was a thing.

Twelve months on and the sands have shifted again.

Ramor fell to their worst defeat in the knock-out stages since their quarter-final loss to the Gaels in 2020. While they have competed strongly at underage level in recent years, notably winning the U16 Division 1 championship last year, a sizeable cohort of their senior team are over the age of 30 and it seems likely that a renovation, although not a complete rebuild, will soon be required.

The manner of Crosserlough’s loss to Gowna in Saturday’s semi-final was more alarming. They were flat, leggy and strangely resigned and managed only token resistance against the side who have been their biggest rivals of recent seasons. Even the ‘Gownas’ in the stadium seemed disappointed in them.

The underage conveyor belt has not been producing strongly either. Whereas Ramor, for all that their senior stock has fallen, have won four Minor Championships since 2013, Crosserlough have won just one since the mid-1990s.

They haven’t become a bad team overnight – this is, after all, a side which won the county championship as recently as 2024 – but regeneration is required and there is the possibility that they could fall away.

So, at the risk of recency bias, the big three looks like it has become a big two – Gowna and Kingscourt – with Ramor and Crosserlough drifting back towards a pack which now includes Cuchulainns and Killygarry.

The Crubany men have been much maligned and, given their repeated group-stage exits, deservedly so to some extent. But they are coming.

Cuchulainns have been a breath of fresh air and enjoyed a superb year on their return to senior football, winning the Division 1 league and reaching the championship semi-final but it shouldn’t be forgotten that it took everything they had to get over Killygarry. Damien Keaney’s side led by 14 points in the drawn game and the teams were level nine times in the replay.

The Gaels are in there somewhere too. Mullahoran have flattered to deceive but are young and could come good yet. Arva are fiercely competitive but, for all that, have won only three matches from nine since graduating to senior, excluding a relegation play-off. Others are looking to crash the party.

The county final will answer a lot of questions but it certainly feels as if the complexion of the senior scene has changed over the last few weeks. Results don’t just drop out of the ether, of course; the reality is that the pecking order changed months ago and we just didn’t know it.

Football followers - and even columnists, imagine! - are forever trying to impose order on the championship, to identify the contenders, the coming teams and the fading forces but no sooner have we managed that and it all changes again.

The way seems clear for someone to dominate – Gowna, with their age profile, look best placed, even though questions remain. Predicting what happens Sunday week, let alone in a couple of years’ time, is a fool’s errand.

The tide comes in, the tide goes out. Sooner or later, even the strongest discover that it cannot be held back, regardless of which way it’s going.