Time to take stock as season ends at inter-county level

By Kevin Egan

Cork are the All-Ireland senior camogie champions, and when the final whistle sounded on their narrow win over Galway on Sunday last, the 2026 intercounty season came to an end.

We all know who won the big trophies, but now that we are well and truly switched over into club activity for the remainder of the year, this column felt like the ideal point to stop, take stock, and identify what happened over the past six months; to look beyond the wins, the losses, the scores and the silverware. Sure, we’ll be doing it all over again before we know it, but as the old saying goes, a man never stands in the same river twice, for he is not the same man and it is not the same river.

We will all be a year older when the 2027 season gets underway, but in what direction is the water flowing, and will we feel the difference when the time comes?

The cries for ‘more’ will continue

Mayo’s All-Ireland final victory will be celebrated for years to come and it was a wonderful feelgood story, but the very public admissions by the team management that a handful of players gave up jobs in Dublin to come home and be better able to commit to playing for Mayo could well start a worrying level of expectation.

Some Mayo players switched jobs, but if Andy Moran is to be taken at his word, David McBrien gave up work in Dublin and came home to be a full-time footballer.

Meanwhile, Galway camogie manager Cathal Murray echoed his view that there should be a team holiday fund for the losing All-Ireland finalists in that sport, which might sound reasonable until someone poses the very reasonable question, which is: where should the money come from?

One podcast centred around female sport in Ireland took it further recently, highlighting the issue of mileage payments, and players being out of pocket for the time spent commuting across the country to training.

Galway had 38 players listed in their ‘player profile’ section of last Sunday’s match programme, 21 were students and 9 of the 17 working players were teachers. That red flag is waving high and freely.

There is an urgent need for some committee to be charged with the responsibility of stepping back and assessing not just where we are, but where we want to be in an ideal world, and how can we get there as best we can.

The sport of Gaelic football was saved by a willingness to be imaginative and to sacrifice a few sacred cows, the same mindset could well be required to prevent yet more expectation for things to be paid for by the magic money tree.

NFL could be set to lose relevance

In Division 2 and 3 of the National Football League, promotion and relegation means everything. Outside of that, not so much, and there is a real concern that for those teams who are chasing big championship silverware, the lesson of 2026 will be that the league is irrelevant.

Donegal went after it successfully, they crashed out in summer, as did Wexford in Division Three. Roscommon were at full pelt in the league and their momentum carried them through the Connacht championship, but they were empty by All-Ireland time.

Meanwhile Monaghan, Wicklow and Tyrone were among those teams who were way off the pace in the spring, but they went on to perform very well in the summer. Add in the ongoing grassroots desire to shed the current sponsor and the eagerness with which Croke Park are dispensing with democratic norms to try and see out the storm of that discontent, and it’s a competition that is in danger of becoming a lot less relevant.

Pragmatism needed in TV debate

The issue of what games are shown live and what games are shown behind a paywall is not going away, but that is in no small part because it’s impossible to hit a moving target. Opponents of GAA+ and the concept of paying to watch intercounty games are never asked to either say where the line is between games that “obviously” should be free-to-air in their minds, and games that don’t matter. Tipperary pundits and Kerry politicians bemoaned the number of times their teams were put on GAA+. But while everybody cries and moans about Kerry vs Donegal or Tipperary vs Clare being behind a paywall, no-one seems concerned that the Donegal hurlers or the Tipp footballers can never be found on a screen, regardless of how many supporters would be willing to pay to see it on their TV or laptop.

The argument falls apart when you insist on a clear answer as to why there should be arbitrary line drawn between some games that are deemed essential when it comes to terrestrial TV coverage, and others that don’t pass that smell test, or when you ask the question about how the necessary financial hit can be absorbed.

Football’s golden era may be ended by stats teams

Already, there are instances of teams doing counter-intuitive things in order to maximise the “expected value” of each of their attacks, and this will only escalate as the body of data around attacking strategy grows more substantial, and thus more reliable. Corner forwards beating their man and running in on goal, only to try and suck in the defence so the ball can be kicked back out for a two-point attempt, is the first canary in the coalmine.

We’ve seen lengthy slow attacks to try and get the right shooter coming onto the ball over 40 metres out, and we’ve seen match previews reduced to lengthy conversations about kickouts, and very little else.

In general, there can be an issue in Gaelic games with slavish adherence to a coached tactic, even when the reality of the game situation would cry out for an alternative approach. The Galway camógs continuing to give Cork goalkeeper Amy Lee some handy short restart options when time was running out and they needed to get the ball back quickly was the perfect example, and football could go the same way yet.

Outside Munster, hurling is in trouble

The Munster championship is papering over a lot of deep cracks in the hurling world right now because the sport is struggling badly elsewhere, even in traditional heartland territories like Wexford, north Westmeath and southwest Meath, south Roscommon, and southwest Armagh. At all levels of the game, average winning margins are rising, real shock results are very rare, and the underage structures are perpetuating and growing the advantages that Munster counties enjoy right now.

Look past the big intercounty games and down to the Arrabawn, Forristal and Celtic Challenge tournaments – the trends all point toward the same eventuality, one of an even more lopsided future. Scores are flying in but there are far too many games that are uncompetitive, and while issues like thrown passes are a concern, it’s not the rules paradigm that will determine the path that the sport of hurling will travel over the next few seasons.

Pressure on pitches set to rise

For the first time since the GAA dispensed with the old National League format where three or four rounds were played before Christmas, two rounds of league games – football and hurling – will be played before January is completed in 2027. The Irish climate is such that games are every bit as likely to be cancelled due to weather in March as they are in January, but the level of activity in the deep winter months is higher than ever, and bigger counties with multiple stadia of an intercounty standard could well start to look at resurfacing some pitches on their smaller grounds to make them more weather resistant in winter, even if that means they are baked hard in summer.

Or perhaps, as astroturf technology continues to improve, one county will bite the bullet and follow in the footsteps of soccer clubs in Scandinavia, or even Athlone Town closer to home, and just get rid of grass entirely. It wouldn’t be ideal from a player welfare point of view, but as we’ve seen in some of the instances above, is player welfare ever top of the agenda in any discussion any more, except perhaps as a Trojan horse?

As we bake in yet another heatwave, it’s easy to forget that winter will come again, and so too will the frost and snow. And when they do, the Gaelic games world will have evolved another little bit, as it always does.