Solutions to hurling's woes are there, if desired outcome is identified

By Kevin Egan

Up until a couple of years ago, hurling people often spoke about their favourite sport in the same way a 10-year-old Liverpool fan might speak about their club; that their heroes are the best there was, the best there is and the best there ever will be.

By the same token, Gaelic football people spoke of their sport the same way a 50-year-old Everton fan might speak of their club. They might vaguely remember that feeling of fresh and youthful optimism while their adult experience has featured no small amount of solidarity and community, but overall, their journey was one of hardship and suffering, leading them to mentally (though never verbally!) accept their place lower down the food chain.

If there are any Evertonian readers of this column, we have no words of solace to offer. They say that money doesn’t make you happy, but that it buys you a better class of misery – well in the case of the blue half of that city, the misery continues, albeit in extremely comfortable surroundings in their new stadium.

Their only solace might be that misery could well have more company. Liverpool fans are somewhat uneasy on the back of a season where they lost more league games than any season since 2015, and they have the grim spectre of Jeff Bezos, a man who has always been right at the vanguard of the enshittification of the world, now lurking in the shadows, wanting to be part of the ownership team.

So too, these are not good times for Ireland’s ancient game, with long and dark shadows darkening the surroundings.

Offaly may have had a relatively promising year, albeit with the significant asterisk of concern for the wellbeing of senior captain Charlie Mitchell, but stepping back to look through a national lens, the number of really good games that were played since the month of April can be counted on the fingers of one hand.

Over the next few months, these concerns will fade from view to a considerable degree. Already the signs are there that we’re in for an entertaining club championship campaign here in Offaly and the same thing could be said about Galway, Tipperary, Cork, Clare and a few more.

But that will only mask the fact that there are flashing warning signs everywhere, and the tendency of so many of the sport’s most fervent devotees to only want to hear-no-evil, see-no-evil, speak-no-evil of the sacred pastime is not going to facilitate the necessary, tough conversations that need to take place.

John Meyler’s review group

We’ve already mentioned in this column about how there was a survey put out looking for people’s views on the game, and how many of the questions were very leading in nature, rather than open-ended. Sure enough, after putting out a survey that asked the question if a rule was needed to ban passes back to the goalkeeper, the rumour mill now suggests that they’re going to propose just such a ban. This is despite the fact that Nickie Quaid took just three passes in last Sunday’s game. Deckchairs, Titanic, etc.

Gaelic football was able to take a step back and start by getting to the root of the problem, which was that it was too easy to control possession and avoid contests. Hurling suffers from the same, but the road to getting back to a place where there are contests for possession will most likely involve that thing that hurling people fear most; namely, more involved referees.

Dubious handpassing, lax enforcement of steps, leniency towards charging into a tackle, all of these things make life impossible when it comes to forcing turnovers, so the only recourse left for a tackler is to try and go in with a high arm and hold up the runner, until reinforcements arrive and another ruck follows.

Add in the growing issue of frontal challenges that are delivered without malice but are no less dangerous for that, such as the one that led to Ronan Glennon’s red card last weekend, and hurling needs to find a way to get back to a different type of contest for the ball.

If we could skip the journey and get to the destination, it wouldn’t be so bad, but that’s not how life works.

Rising inequality

In hurling, as in life, the gap is widening all the way up along every tier of society, which means fewer and fewer games that have the potential to be close contests.

It’s easy to focus on the very top and say that there are only a handful of teams that can keep it pucked out to Limerick, but the same could have been said about Kilkenny before them, and not since the 1990s has hurling been in a place where there are more than a couple of teams capable of knocking over the top dogs.

Moving down the pecking order, however, things get even more bleak. A total of 95 championship games were played across all grades in 2026, and in 50 of those games, the winning margin was three clear goals, or more. Even in a world where there are now five distinct tiers of competition (and that’s counting the Munster SHC and Leinster SHC as one tier, even though one could argue there are two tiers within the top grade) it is impossible to put together a basket of half a dozen teams where at least one or two games wouldn’t be a landslide.

In every intercounty hurling championship this year, save for the Munster SHC (which most would have said was below par) there was at least one match played where the winning margin was 20 points or more.

Already we can say that in the 2027 championships, Galway (Leinster), Kildare (Joe McDonagh), Kerry (Christy Ring) and Mayo (Nickey Rackard) are odds on favourites to win those competitions.

Contrast that with Gaelic football, where you could draw up a pot of eight mid-table counties easily, and every single possible fixture therein would be at most a one or two-point game on paper. And it doesn’t matter how aesthetically pleasing any sport might be, supporters travel for competition, and to answer that most rudimentary of questions, ‘who will win?’ There’s no satisfaction in any game where that fundamental issue is beyond doubt before the ball is thrown in.

Solving one problem can go a long way towards solving the other.

There is no easy fix to inequality, particularly in a world where Cork pick from roughly 120 active hurling clubs and the 13 counties north of the line from Galway to Meath pick from 63 between them.

But what Gaelic football has proven is that a radical shake up of the game offers a window of opportunity to a motivated and inspired team to thrive in the chaos, and to make significant gains by adapting quickly to a new world.

If hurling took the approach that the sport wanted to push back against the modern practice of “playing through the lines” by changing the rules to only allow handpassing off the stick, clamping down on players charging into the tackle and enforcing the existing rules regarding steps, then all of a sudden we go back to the lost arts of flicking the ball out of a player’s possession and moving the ball faster into an open area of the field to avoid getting sucked into a ruck.

You no longer need to fit into the typical profile of six foot three, 90kg weight and with less than 10% body fat in order to survive, and suddenly we have a world where there is more uncertainty in the game. And if we get there, only then will we realise how much we needed it.