Six teams left and five matches, barring replays, to go. Who will be the 2017 All-Ireland hurling champions? It is as open-looking a race as can be imagined: no big cats in the jungle any more.
Valid cases can be made for Cork and Galway, the two provincial champions. Tipperary, having emerged from the qualifiers, are dangerous floaters. Waterford and Clare may look less plausible eventual winners than the above trio but would fancy their chances of eliminating any of them on a given day and would be entitled to. Wexford won’t be sampling glory in September but would fancy themselves in a low-scoring, tactical affair against Waterford next Sunday and, similarly, would be entitled to.
All on the day, as the cliché has it? The former Tipperary manager Eamon O’Shea, by profession an economist and a man who a few years ago, after his team had suffered a couple of early defeats in the National League, counselled the waiting journalists against drawing deep and meaningful conclusions from “too small a sample size”, reckons that the dice is never loaded but rather always spinning. Chance, he maintains, will play a part in deciding the destination of the MacCarthy Cup.
All on the day? Mark Perry, a betting analyst and mathematician, points out that every team has an “expected level” of performance. Reach their expected level on a given day and the best teams will win. Exceed their expected level on a given day and the middle-ranking teams can win. “When there’s an overlap between the superior team under-performing and the inferior team over-performing there’s a higher probability of an outcome you don’t expect,” he adds. It’s a different way of saying that the underdogs “hurled above themselves” but it amounts to the same thing.
Given the presence of 30 players with sticks, a referee and a small ball, is hurling more open to the possibility of random events than, say, tennis or snooker or some sport featuring only two participants? Not necessarily, Perry says, but whereas Roger Federer’s bad-day variability is “quite low”, even one man playing well for a less fancied hurling team can change the dynamic. “He hurls out of his skin, his team-mates take their cue, it runs through the team and the outcome is a really good performance.”
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It has long been an article of faith that the best team, which is to say the team with the best squad, always wins the league in England: a 38-match programme ensures that. By contrast it can fairly be argued that the best team doesn’t necessarily win the World Cup: seven matches is, as O’Shea might observe, far too small a sample size. Although Germany might have been the best team at the last finals in 2014, they required extra time to beat Algeria in the first knockout game and again to see off Argentina in the final, the latter after Gonzalo Higuaín made a mess of a one-on-one with Germany’s Manuel Neuer at 0-0 in the first half.
Does the best team always carry off the MacCarthy Cup? The high proportion of recent All-Ireland titles that have been decided by unlikely occurrences makes one wonder. Look at Tipperary in 2010. Dazzling champions when depriving Kilkenny of five titles in a row, but that was a Kilkenny team without two of its pillars in Brian and Richie Hogan, and robbed of the biggest pillar of all when Henry Shefflin succumbed to his cruciate injury in the early stages of the game. No wonder the roof collapsed. Nor was that Tipperary’s only instance of fortune in 2010, for Galway were leading them in the All-Ireland quarter-final when Ollie Canning was forced off six minutes from time after shipping a bad belt on the hand. After he departed Tipperary won the game with points sourced from Canning’s corner.
Look at Clare in 2013. The team that stole the hearts of a nation, yes, and with 25 scores to Cork’s 19 they were patently the brighter team in the drawn final. Yet they still needed not one but two improbable breaks at the death to escape with a replay: Brian Gavin allowing additional stoppage time and the unlikeliest of suspects, their corner-back Domhnall O’Donovan, materialising to land a Hail Mary attempt from out the field.
Look at Kilkenny in 2014. Patently superior to Tipperary in the replay, except the replay only came about because John O’Dwyer’s free drifted a couple of inches wide with the last puck of the game first time around. That wasn’t a 50-50 shot in view of O’Dwyer’s expertise with dead balls but it was still, Perry argues, “a random event”. Random events of the kind that decide championships.
Look at Tipperary last year. A performance for the ages in the final, but in the semi-final they beat a Galway team that had lost two players — Adrian Tuohy and, significantly, Joe Canning — to injury at half-time. Freakish stuff.
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Maybe the best team will win the 2017 All Ireland hurling title. Alternatively maybe the least unlucky team will.