Ah, there it is.
After two years of GAAGO-gate, it was looking like this inter-county championship season might slip past without a similar spark for the easily inflamed.
The doomed football group stages belatedly providing a half-flicker of interest? Hmm. Three out of four teams getting through still makes it too dull a format to be spared.
All-Ireland finals should be in September? More of a traditionalist gripe than a silly-season cause célèbre.
Step forward, the Munster hurling final being decided on a penalty shootout instead of going to a replay.
"Against the ethos of hurling" declared one caller to Liveline (where else?) in the aftermath of Cork's win* over Limerick.
Ethos? Surely, if hurling has an ethos, it is to be an entertaining, semi-lawless expression of the poetry and violence that resides in the soul of the Gael. Or something.
The caller repeated a familiar refrain that penalties are "not in our culture" and suggested a 65-metre-free-taking competition would be a better tie-breaker.
Except 1 on 1 penalty pucks are now as much a part of hurling rules as frees and a lot less dull to watch. As the GAA discovered when they trialled the 65s method in 2018 and immediately changed it. The real, often unspoken, issue for many people with penalty shootouts is that they are too similar to soccer (spits on ground).
Do we need a tie-breaker like penalties at all? That is a better question.
In a high-scoring game like hurling, 'next score wins' might be a more natural end, perhaps after old-school extra extra time, as Limerick’s Cian Lynch subsequently suggested.
Replays have a venerable place in Gaelic games history. Limerick beat Tipperary at the third attempt in the 2007 Munster hurling semi-final. The Dublin and Meath footballers needed four games in Leinster in 1991. The 2013 All-Ireland hurling final and 2016 football decider were both memorable rematches.
However, replays were eliminated for all games except the All-Ireland finals in 2022 when the GAA moved to the inter-county/club split-season model.
GAA president Jarlath Burns this week weighed in behind their return, observing that his native Armagh are, by far, the county to have suffered most (four defeats) in penalty shootouts.
Not too many people were calling Liveline about those though. Either John and Josephine Hurling care more than their footballing cousins or they are just more vocal. The fact that so many people profess to adore the small ball yet Clare and Kilkenny can only attract 40,000 to Croke Park for an All-Ireland semi-final indicates the latter.
Of course, it wasn’t until last Saturday that the snake of penalties entered paradise on earth, the Munster Hurling Championship.
One shootout in four years suggests it’s not something we will need to worry about very often, but more importantly, despite losing* to Cork, Limerick are still in the All-Ireland championship.
The Munster title is a prestigious one, which offers its winners an extended rest, but ultimately it is now a stepping stone. The Treaty desired the company of Liam MacCarthy far more than Mick Mackey last winter. A penalty shootout deciding an All-Ireland semi-final, as could still happen, would be a far greater cause for concern.
But many GAA fans also seem to think there are 60 weeks in a year. Re-instating replays for provincial hurling finals would either mean the winners from the other province waiting five weeks for their semi-final or the losers of the replay playing a quarter-final the following weekend. Is that fairer than finishing a provincial final on the day?
And replays wouldn’t just apply to Munster hurling and Ulster football, but also to all the other provincial competitions that live under the stairs.
It’s worth remembering why they were removed in the first place. As part of the move to a defined inter-county calendar, which allows club players to actually know when their games will be on and maybe even have a summer holiday. They had to form a lobby group (the CPA) to get that basic level of respect.
It’s never the current inter-county players talking about ‘surrendering September’ to other sports. They overwhelmingly support the new system. And in an amateur sport, their opinions should matter more than people who watch on TV and complain on social media.
Absolutely, the calendar could still be refined. The GAA president suggested this week that the All-Ireland finals could yet be pushed back into August, which would seem a more natural fit, but not until 2027 as under his administration they have prioritised lucrative concerts in Croke Park that month.
If that financial hit could be swallowed – and the GAA gets a lot of unfair snideness for an organisation that redistributes the vast majority of revenue back to its units – then space could be freed up for provincial final or, more importantly, All-Ireland semi-final replays.
While you're at it, eliminate the pointless preliminary SHC quarter-finals and accept the reality that the Joe McDonagh Cup is the second tier. The finalists getting a hammering the week after their decider from the third-placed team in Leinster or Munster does nothing for anybody. Kildare might fancy their chances this weekend but Laois beating Dublin in 2019 remains the only victory for a Joe Mc team in 10 contests.
Counties could all start their club championships from a set date, perhaps with a later start for the All-Ireland finalists. Clubs might have to accept that not having county players back for league games (sorry Noel McCaffrey) or a new championship format is the price of the split-season. Though the move to getting everything finished in the calendar year seems to have stalled with January club finals so you wouldn't be overly optimistic.
The amateur and (mostly) intra-national status of the GAA lends itself to the feeling that everybody in Ireland owns it, and its democratic structure enables continuous debate and tweaking. That is wonderful in some ways but also seems to lead to endless moaning and knee-jerk reactions.
Penalty shootouts might not be the best way to decide a hurling match, but the sport has bigger issues, like the struggle to attract players on a true national basis, and vague/unenforced rules that can apparently change mid-game, or depending which province the referee is from.
Let’s keep some perspective. Something more worthy of the hurling fan's outrage will be along soon.
