Championship is enduring a crisis of competitiveness, but hurling is not in need of saving

A message in a bottle lapped up on my YouTube feed the other day. It was precious footage of Éamonn Cregan being interviewed by Mick Dunne in one of the old cavernous dugouts in Semple Stadium after Limerick had won the 1980 Munster final.Cregan was one of the greatest Limerick players of all time and in his retirement he was one of the game’s sharpest commentators. In those days there was only one All-Ireland hurling semi-final and for the first time ever the last three teams standing were Limerick, Galway and Offaly. Dunne raised this novelty with Cregan.“It’s about time that it happened,” said Cregan. “It’s what hurling needs every year. I don’t like monopoly situations – and that’s what you have in football and that’s what you have in hurling.”In answer to a follow-up question, Cregan doubled down on this sentiment: “You get browned off seeing the same players, year-in, year-out.”READ MOREBy then, Limerick had won just one All-Ireland in 40 years, Galway hadn’t won an All-Ireland since 1923 and Offaly had never won an All-Ireland. The same three teams turned up at the same stage a year later, but since then Offaly, Galway and Limerick have only appeared in the All-Ireland semi-finals once in the same year – 1994.Think about that: once in 45 years.Hurling’s craving for variety has a fatalistic relationship with tipping points. The “monopoly” that Cregan mentioned to Mick Dunne was the dominance of hurling’s Big Three. Over the previous 20 years, Cork, Kilkenny and Tipperary had won 17 All-Irelands between them; in the 20 years before that, their combined haul had been 15.On that day in Thurles in 1980, Limerick had denied Cork six Munster titles in a row; they had already won eight of the previous 11. Through the generations, hurling has always been vulnerable to invasions by a superior force and long occupations.Limerick manager John Kiely lifts the Liam MacCarthy Cup after beating Galway. Photograph: Ryan Byrne/Inpho How many times would people have said that this was bad for hurling, maybe even catastrophically bad? And yet the championship continued, somehow. Nobody ever pulled out in despair. Since 2006, Kilkenny and Limerick have won 14 All-Irelands between them, more than any other two counties in a comparable time span in the history of the game. The Greatest Team of All Time and the Second Greatest Team of All Time came along in whatever order is your preference.This was hurling’s familiar experience of dominance except with an extraordinarily new twist. Winning back-to-back All-Irelands used to be seen as a big deal, and then two teams came along who binged on All-Irelands like a miniseries box set.In recent months, hurling has been plunged into a period of introspection, like a retreat on Lough Derg with black tea and dry toast. This year’s hurling championship produced spluttering storylines and was numbingly devoid of exhilarating spectacles.Of the 32 games played in the Liam MacCarthy Cup, 16 ended in double-digit beatings and of the 11 teams who lined up in the competition only two of them were spared such a fate: Limerick and Waterford. In Waterford’s case, a stoppage-time goal from a penalty in the Gaelic Grounds kept them off that list.In the history of the championship, there had never been a year when so many elite teams had flirted with receivership. It felt like the hurling economy had overheated and now we were dealing with the crash.But it is important not to conflate a dispiriting championship with the game itself. The championship is going through a crisis of competitiveness, but hurling is not in need of saving.The Hurling Advisory Group, under the leadership of John Meyler, are not going to make radical recommendations. They will try to address the epidemic of illegal handpasses, they may do something about the back pass to the goalie, they know the black card rule needs to be redrafted and they’re toying with the idea of increasing the value of a penalty goal scored after a black card offence to four points.John Meyler heads the Hurling Advisory Group. Photograph: Inpho Keeping three players inside the opposition 45 is on their minds too, but there won’t be any more than a handful of suggestions, all of which will be trialled in third-level games in the autumn.Croke Park are said to be keen on trying two-point sidelines, a suggestion clearly influenced by the energising effect of two-pointers in football. For a variety of reasons, it could not have the same impact. Nobody could deliberately create that shooting opportunity in hurling, by those means, and scoring from a sideline is a much more specialist skill than kicking a score from 40 metres in football.Since the season finished there has been no shortage of suggested changes to the championship format. Many of them are imaginative. All of them involve more hurling games in the last two months of the season and mitigated consequences for not performing in the provincial championship. Some of it smacks of panic.In any given year, the problems and the solutions in the championship are always local. It will be staggering, for example, if Tipperary, Kilkenny and Wexford are not better next year than they were this year. That has nothing to do with tweaking the championship format, but it has everything to do with new energy and refocused minds.[ Malachy Clerkin: If you’re coaching kids with your county in mind, you’re just as transactional as Aussie RulesOpens in new window ]A review group set up by the Leinster Council to reflect on their provincial hurling championship will report soon and, according to one source, they have engineered a way to “introduce more jeopardy” into the competition, while also paying attention to the Joe McDonagh counties in their bailiwick. That will be worth considering, for sure.Will next year’s championship be any better? In a fascinating interview with Pat Gilroy on these pages at the weekend, he said about hurling that “we’re probably down to a three-team competition in terms of the All-Ireland”. How many times has that been the case over the last 140 years? It would be much easier to count the years when it wasn’t the case.The GAA’s McNamee Commission agonised over hurling in 1971. In 1994, the Hurling Revival Sub-Committee concluded that hurling was “in crisis”. The Hurling 2020 report, published 11 years ago, said that “we have been doing the game an injustice for a long time”.Ultimately, has this hand-wringing and self-rebuke ever done the game any service? How long have we been listening to dire warnings that the game is about to fall off a cliff?Is there any chance that mightn’t be true?