League decider rarely a guide to Munster final pairing

Tue, 07 Apr, 2026 - 07:15

Denis Hurley

Much like how each spring brings talk of the top English teams being on the hunt for a quadruple – something never achieved – there will also be talk during the national hurling league as to how the championship season will play out.

Given that the last non-Munster winner of the All-Ireland was Galway in 2017, the speculation has centred around multiple meetings between the top counties from the province.

Everyone in Munster meets each other in the round-robin and then the top two clash in the provincial final – they could also clash in the All-Ireland, so three championship clashes is a possibility. Of course, ‘could’ is the opposite word – in 1997, the first year of the back-door system, Clare and Tipperary met in the Munster and All-Ireland finals but the only other occasion that the deciders have had the same make-up was in 2020, when Limerick beat Waterford twice.

Of course, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, there was no round-robin in 2020 or 2021 and so the counties didn’t have a round-robin meeting – but that didn’t stop ‘trilogy’ talk in 2022 after Waterford won the league. As it happened, the Déise didn’t even get out of Munster that year.

This time around, the good form of Cork and Limerick in the league brought about even more ambitious discourse – the ‘quintology’. The first two clashes have gone the way of the Shannonsiders but, while they will definitely do battle at SuperValu Páirc Uí Chaoimh in two and a half weeks, a lot needs to fall into place beyond that.

Sunday’s league final bridged a 46-year gap back to the last Cork-Limerick meeting in the decider and, if they were to both make the Munster final, it would bring an even longer one to an end.

You have to go back to 1971 for the last instance of an all-Munster league final being repeated in the provincial final – back then, Limerick came out on top in the league decider against Tipperary before the tables were turned in the Munster final.

In the interim, there have been 13 all-Munster league finals – seven involving Cork – but, while one ended up having the same pairing as the All-Ireland (last year), in none of them did the protagonists also oppose each other in the Munster final.

All-Munster league finals since 1971 (winners first) – 1972: Cork v Limerick; 1974: Cork v Limerick; 1980: Cork v Limerick; 1985: Limerick v Clare; 1992: Limerick v Tipperary; 1998: Cork v Waterford; 2001: Tipperary v Clare; 2015: Waterford v Cork; 2016: Clare v Waterford; 2019: Limerick v Waterford; 2020: Limerick v Clare*; 2022: Waterford v Cork; 2025: Cork v Tipperary**.