COLUMN: Tipp hurling final replay delivers an epic but is this as good as it gets?

What a fitting end to the brilliant year that was the 2023 Tipperary club hurling championship as, without doubt, the best two teams in the Premier treated us all to 120-plus minutes of the most enthralling action we could have hoped for in our showpiece final.

Overall, it has been one hell of a club championship in Tipperary this year with so many quality games gracing the pitches around the county over the last three months, and the general consensus amongst the hurling public is that this year’s fare has been amongst the most competitive in Tipperary in recent memory.

You need only look towards the relegation battle that unfolded over the last month between clubs who have enough quality to be in the top 16 clubs in the county, with Upperchurch Drombane coming full circle as they fell through the trapdoor just 12 months after making it to the final four of the race for Dan Breen in 2022.

Indeed, we’ve seen multiple examples of the cutthroat nature of the club championships in other counties, with Glen Rovers dropping out of the senior grade for the first time in eons, while the most recent casualty in this regard was Kieran O’Rahilly’s in Kerry, who were relegated to Intermediate football in the Kingdom less than a year after winning a Munster senior club championship!

It simply highlights the lack of mercy there is in sport and shows that any team who rests on their laurels are playing a dangerous game. Upperchurch supporters will be reading this and will wonder how it has come to this, but the competition in this year’s senior hurling campaign was fierce.

Holycross Ballycahill are a team that looks capable of stepping up to the mark in the grade, while Roscrea got that promotion bounce which so often comes after a team wins a championship at a lower grade the year previous.

These two teams in particular came very close to claiming big scalps in the quarter-finals and it would have been deserved in both cases.

It highlights just how good the format has become in Tipperary after years of bog standard championship structures where teams were promoted and demoted in the board room, which was an utter disaster when trying to make the structures suitable for a fair and ultimately, competitive championship.

Roll back to 2018 when the current championship formats came into being and it was plain that it was the beginning of a process to finally separate the teams into their correct gradings and improve the quality of the championships at every grade.

Reflecting on the year  as I  drove home from Thurles last Sunday after the senior final replay, was that the formats are working perfectly. We had some incredibly good weekends of fare across the grades, with upsets, draws, high scores, and even drama in the form of the newly introduced three-way tie scoring format; which Golden Kilfeacle will be most pleased with!

 But how does it stand up to the scrutiny of a deep dive into the numbers? Of course, the winning and losing margins of a game on paper can sometimes not give you the full picture, but I decided to look at how the senior hurling championship has progressed from 2018 to now; specifically the senior hurling championship in Tipperary, and the results suggest that the gradings are still far from perfect and there is still a fairly big gap between the top 12 teams in the county versus the rest.

As we know, the three adult grades were divided into tiers of 16 teams for the first time which includes a promotion and relegation element each year. The teams in the first year of the format in 2018 were there by virtue of their performances in the previous year’s championship, and the general discussion around this concluded that time would be needed to get teams into their correct grade, but it had to be done on the field of play and not in the boardroom.

In 2018, the average margin of victory over the course of the 32 games came in at 12.5 points overall, which is a fairly high total given the amount of matches played.

As we said though, this was expected at the time with some pain required for ultimate long-term gain of the competition, but this hasn’t really improved by much in the intervening years.

In 2019, the average margin of victory actually increased slightly, with 13 points in the reading, with some big beatings for teams in the group stages skewing the results.

The covid year of 2020 did little to improve the statistic with the average coming in at 12 points by the championship end with big margins in the semi-finals that year keeping the total higher than it could have been. 

There was a marked improvement over the course of the 2021 championship, with the average dropping to 10 points, while 2022 also came in at the same margin, and that suggests that it was trending - albeit slowly - in the right direction in terms of competitiveness.

And finally, onto the recently completed 2023 championship!

Interestingly, the margin actually increased again on the previous two championship years, and rather than delve into sing-digits, it went up to an average of 11 points of a winning margin per game.

You could point to some freakish results like the group games between Toomevara and Kilruane MacDonaghs which nobody expected to end in a 10 poiint win for the Greyhounds, or the group clash between eventual finalists Kiladangan and Thurles Sarsfields which ended in a nine point win for the north team. Add in JK Brackens’ unexpected trouncing of Drom & Inch there and you could possibly argue that some teams performed well below their capabilities but it does make for some interesting reading nonetheless.

Is our championship as good and competitive as we think?

For my part, it would suggest that the Tipperary hurling championship is still far from the finished product, particularly in the group stages where the meat of the beatings dished out can be found over the last six years.

With the exception of Roscrea this year perhaps, no team that has come up from the Premier Intermediate grade since 2018 have managed to become really competitive in terms of regular qualification for knockout hurling, and generally, they are in the scrap for relegation more often than not.

The stats also highlight this in that the knockout games - excluding  preliminary quarter-finals - are where the competition evens out. 

 The average margins in the quarter-finals are 4.7 points. For the semi-finals it is 2.8 points, while the finals have undoubtedly shown their narrow margins, with the average coming in at 2.8 with three of those six finals needing a replay.

Do we need less teams in the senior championship?

It’s an interesting question and considering we have had six championship years where the margin of victory has fluctuated between 10 and 13 points, it is probably a question worth asking.

There’s no question that the championship has improved from the divisional and county mess that it was pre-2018 but there is still major room for improvement, especially when it comes to the teams which make up the top 9 to 16 in the county.

A famous quote by a well-known literary figure says “To stand still is to be left behind” and although we have had a fantastic championship year and a good product from the outside looking in, there is always room to improve it further and drive the standard of hurling in the county to even greater heights, which would be no bad thing!