Offaly the first football team to bow out after latest defeat
Kevin Egan
There’s not a lot to say about last Saturday’s Tailteann Cup game between Offaly and Limerick in Rathkeale - which the home side won by 2-10 to 0-8 - other than there were traces of interest in the opening half, but those traces soon vanished after half-time.
With Down beating London heavily – a result which doesn’t bode well for the type of afternoon Offaly are likely to endure against the Mourne County on Sunday week in Cavan – it means that out of the 33 senior inter-county football teams (including, London and New York, with Kilkenny not competing) Offaly are currently the only one formally eliminated from contention for silverware.
No doubt the internal post-mortem had begun and the county executive are examining what exactly happened since the Dublin game to cause a collapse of this nature, but the argument that the London result was a one-off, if anyone was even trying to make it in the first place, is certainly no longer valid now.
Regardless of the season’s dismal conclusion, 2024 marked the coming of age of many of the Offaly U-20 heroes of three years ago. Lee Pearson took on the captaincy and played up to that responsibility throughout. Cormac Egan found a new role that suits his undoubted talents down to the ground. John Furlong looks right at home in the half back line, while Keith O’Neill is now a serious scoring threat at this level. Others like Cathal Flynn, Rory Egan and Jack Bryant showed flashes of their immense potential, albeit not consistently.
But the realities of Irish society can’t be ignored, and there are considerable ‘pull’ factors that cause young men and women in their early 20s to consider their options abroad, not to mention the ‘push’ factors of a housing crisis that has been perpetuated by older generations (including that of this columnist) who can’t see beyond the high value of their own home, and possibly additional properties.
Offaly GAA can’t address the fact that as a society, we’ve forgotten the lessons of our history and built our society to suit the property-owning classes. But what it can do is work to make sure that playing football for Offaly is as attractive as it can be for those players that are capable of doing it, and doing it well.
When we see what’s happened this year across minor, U-20, senior and also what promises to be a dreadfully dull club championship before some element of risk finally gets introduced in September, there’s a lot of work to do on that front.