2024 review: High quality football final can't mask what went before

By Kevin Egan

The task of discussing the 2024 race for the Dowling Cup is undoubtedly a challenging one.

The topic of the format has been discussed to death, and moreover, there is absolutely no doubt that what was in place simply didn’t work. A system that was implemented with the aim of giving clubs an extra game only served to take the edge off the group stages, and so there isn’t a lot of meaningful football to assess.

Out of those games that did take place, many of them were uncompetitive, and perhaps most significantly of all, it’s hard to pick out any club that significantly underachieved or overachieved, though, of course, Tullamore had reason the happiest of the eight after retaining the Dowling Cup.

However, the year can best be summarized as saying that Tullamore continue to improve; Ferbane died with their boots on after producing their best performance of the year in the county final and remain the biggest threat; while Rhode are still very dependent on Niall McNamee, as evidenced by how their attack misfired in his absence.

Edenderry’s season ended just like their 2023 campaign, in a semi-final defeat to Tullamore, but their dismal showing in late September was a world away from the ambush they almost completed 14 months ago. Shamrocks made a great start through the group stages but still looked a little bit off the pace at the business end of proceedings, albeit they will take a lot of heart from how they performed given the absence of a handful of established senior players.

Durrow remain an enigma and nothing that happened in 2024 would point towards any renewed focus on their bid to get to the next level as a senior football force in a year. Ballycommon came agonizingly close to securing what would have been momentous victories against Tullamore and Shamrocks but didn’t get there, and Bracknagh will be very keen to see how the first county board meeting of 2025 goes, as that will determine what level they play at in this year’s senior championship.

Time for a bigger rethink?

The first trap we need to avoid when we examine what 2024 has taught us when it comes to senior football in the county is bias based on recent events. It would be easy to look back at an excellent senior football final, where the standard of play was very high and both Ferbane and Tullamore pushed each other to the wire, and say that things are moving in the right direction. And if there were four or five games of that standard at various stages of the season, then a certain amount of optimism could be justified. There weren’t, however.

Instead, it appeared that since both the Tullamore and Ferbane teams are well-packed with players that played senior or U-20 football or hurling for Offaly last year, they were both able to operate with a degree of pace and power that other teams simply couldn’t match. Both Rhode and Edenderry togged out with a handful of players at that level, but they also had a couple of players each that wouldn’t necessarily stand out if they played on the intermediate sides of the two county finalists.

Shamrocks didn’t look like they had any issues in terms of conditioning, but they had to make do in a couple of positions, in a way that wouldn’t have been the case if they just had Paddy Dunican and Kieran Dolan to bolster a decent group.

But there’s no doubt that there is a vicious circle which is hard to break. In the absence of enough clubs with that level of depth, the stronger clubs can keep their powder dry for the bigger games that really matter, which perpetuates the cycle of group games, often played with key players absent, lacking the edge needed to really push teams on.

The historical enmity that might give a little bit more bite to a Ferbane versus Clara or an Edenderry vs Gracefield tie is missing too, and while the likely expansion to ten teams will simultaneously make the group stages more meaningful and also bring new blood into the competition, the GAA as a whole seems to be entering an era where smaller clubs are farther off the pace than ever and where depth invariably outweighs a couple of individual stars.

Out of the 31 Irish clubs that entered the All-Ireland senior club championships this year, only really Rathgormack (Waterford), Loughmore-Castleiney (Tipperary) and Abbeylara (Longford) can be said to represent really small communities, with Erne Gaels (Fermanah) and Rathvilly (Carlow) slightly bigger. Yet every one of those clubs would pull from a bigger catchment area than a good handful of the sides that will chase the Dowling Cup in 2025.

Where does that leave an Offaly football championship that is in dire need of a shake up, and that looks so anaemic relative to the hurling side of the equation? It’s hard to tell, and there are no easy answers. There is a long history of parish sides togging out and the existence of underage clubs like St Broughan’s, St Manchan’s, Na Fianna and St Vincent’s would seem to be an obvious pathway to enable that, but that in turn only works if the constituent clubs accept that their own ambitions have to be bumped down the priority list.

Kerry’s divisional structure would be a better model, but here too, clubs would have to accept the price that would need to be paid in the form of player time, club funds and the removal of the dual code option to make that work. The prospect of getting a system like that to be supported and voted through seems unlikely.

Finding a way to complete what seems another mission impossible – reinvigorating the football league – would probably go a long way towards bringing overall standards up. If clubs can only compete when they have 25 footballers that could do a job in a senior championship match, even if that’s a job for just ten minutes, then better preparation is essential. But the Offaly leagues can be littered with games where one side’s level of effort and interest is minimal, and that in turn renders the game a pointless exercise for the other side, and too many games of that nature leaves players woefully unprepared for when the heat gets turned up (eventually).

If the SFC does replicate the hurling structure in 2025, then that looks like a positive step – though perhaps an argument could be made for doing the same at senior 'B' level, or even ending the charade and going back to calling the second tier championship intermediate again. The presence of Mickey Harte in the county right now is certainly as good an excuse as any to start canvassing around to see what can be done to try and create a little bit more edge and fire in the flagship football championship, and not just at the final stage.