All-Ireland SHC: Preliminary quarter-finals are a waste of everyone's time
Donnacha Hartnett of Laois in action against Darragh McCarthy of Tipperary during the GAA Hurling All-Ireland Senior Championship Round 1 match between Laois and Tipperary at Laois Hire O'Moore in Portlaoise, Laois. Picture: Daire Brennan/Sportsfile
At halftime in Portlaoise, the scoreline was still respectable. Tipperary led Laois, as expected, by 1-18 to 0-12.
By the 38th minute, Tipp’s lead had grown to 2-19 to 0-14. Then came a Laois restart. Cathal Dunne’s misplaced puckout was easily intercepted by John McGrath. He picked out Andrew Ormond in the centre. Ormond popped the handpass over the top to Jason Forde. He smashed it into the far corner. A gap of 14 points after just 39 minutes of hurling.
It ended 3-32 to 0-18. Laois managed just six points in the second half. Kildare didn’t fare much better in the other preliminary quarter-final, shipping a 3-25 to 0-13 defeat to Dublin.
Another year gone, and in 12 attempts, Laois’s 2019 win over Dublin remains the only upset by a Joe McDonagh team in the All-Ireland series.
It’s easy to see why many hurling fans are questioning the value of the preliminary quarter-finals. And it’s hard to argue with them.
Over the years, these fixtures have served up some heavy beatings.
Yes, Offaly bounced back to beat Laois the following year and return to Leinster, where they’ve held their own. But what purpose does a 32-point thrashing serve, especially just a week after the Joe McDonagh Cup final?
There are really only three:
If you remove the two Joe McDonagh finalists, you’d need two other teams to fill the gaps. One from Leinster and one from Munster? That undermines the integrity of the provincial championships. What makes Munster in particular so compelling is the cutthroat nature of it all.
This year, for example, Clare would have gone through despite losing to Waterford and Tipp and drawing with a 14-man Cork side. One win over a Limerick team that had already qualified shouldn’t be enough. Yet even Clare, flawed as they were, would likely have provided a better contest than Laois.
This eliminates two games from an already short All-Ireland series – not ideal either.
Shane Keegan, Laois GAA’s Head of Games Development, reflected on the issue after finishing his stint as Cobh Ramblers manager in 2023:
“I suppose the success we had in 2019 is probably the only exception, I think in every other year the Joe McDonagh winners were pretty much hammered in the next round.
“There’s one side of me saying, I’d hate to have lost what we achieved in 2019. In GAA circles it’s the biggest memory for me in the last 20 years of Laois GAA. It was unbelievable for us in hurling circles to experience something like that.
“The opportunity to do that would be essentially taken away.
“I'm not 100% sure on that [whether the pathway should remain],” Shane remarked. “I'm not 100% sure how beneficial it is for us to be annihilated by 30 or 40 points, as I've seen happen at times.”
That might be the least bad option – but let’s be honest about what it means. Over 12 preliminary quarter-finals, the combined score difference between Joe McDonagh teams and their provincial opponents is +195, for the favourites.
These games serve little purpose for the likes of Tipperary and Dublin and do nothing to meaningfully develop counties like Laois or Kildare.
So, are we really serving anyone by staging two one-sided games every summer? Or is it time to admit the current structure is broken – and start designing something better?
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