Space on the calendar needed for Ulster Hurling Championship return

The return of the Ulster Senior Intercounty Hurling Championship has been a point of discussion for some time, but according to Kevin Kelly, Ulster GAA’s provincial hurling manager, the biggest obstacle remains the lack of space in the condensed split-season calendar.

While the competition’s return has the full backing of both the Ulster Council and the Hurling Development Committee, Kelly says it is entirely dictated by the congestion of the current calendar.

The Ulster Championship ran from 1901 until it was discontinued in 2017, with Antrim topping the roll of honour with 57 titles. The 2017 final saw Antrim defeat Armagh 5-22 to 1-12 at the Owenbeg Centre of Excellence.

Derry has won four Ulster titles, with their last in 2001 and their most recent final appearance in 2014, losing to Antrim by a single point.

“Ulster GAA do want the Ulster Championship back; they never wanted to get rid of it in the first place. The issue is that there is simply no place in the calendar for it,” Kelly explained.

“Hurling needs space to breathe, and it doesn’t have that. I don’t think hurling, and in some cases Gaelic football, has space to breathe across the country. It’s just such a tight turnaround with the calendar, and that’s ultimately what it comes down to.”

The introduction of the split season has given clubs across the country certainty on when their games will be played, in both codes. It has also created a condensed block for the intercounty championship, but this structure has not been without criticism.

All Ulster counties now participate in the tiered championships of the Joe McDonagh, Christy Ring, Nicky Rackard, and Lory Meagher, which conclude in the first week of June before breaking for club championships that begin in early August.

The National League runs from late January until early April, with tiered championships following from mid-April to June.

For Kelly, the lack of free weeks and the priority given to the tiered championships make the reintroduction of the Ulster Senior Championship unviable under the current schedule, believing that a change of approach is desperately needed if the competition is to return.

The period between the end of the tiered championships and the start of the club campaign was previously seen as the only opportunity to run the Ulster Championship, but it fell by the wayside due to a lack of interest from the competing counties.

“Ulster GAA has tried this approach. They ran the Championship after the tiered competitions back in 2015. As soon as the tiered championships finished, the Ulster Championship was played off, but it just didn’t work.”

“Sometimes it wasn’t completed properly, and teams didn’t field their strongest line-ups. For example, Antrim narrowly defeated Down and Derry by a point in 2015 and 2014, and those were brilliant games, but a look at the squads that competed in Leinster shows that most of those teams were made up of substitutes and fringe players.”

“It would be mentioned regularly throughout the Ulster Hurling Committee, but the conversation is shut down very quickly because of the issues surrounding where we fit it in. It was always about where does it fit in the schedule? Well, there’s no room between the league and championship, so where do we run it? Where is the appetite?”

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For Kelly, the only viable solution is to reintroduce the championship as a preseason competition, as it is simply the only opportunity to run it within the confines of the current GAA calendar.

“The chance is to play it as a preseason tournament. In the current structure, that would make the most sense. There was chat not long ago to see if we could run it as a preseason tournament before the league.

“We put that out to the counties, and they said they feel it degrades the tournament a little bit. But the national level isn't going to change their structure or dates. That’s the only chance we have to run this.”

“I would be saying to link it with something like the Conor McGuirk Cup. I can’t see why we can’t run both at the same time, with the McGuirk Cup as a second tier for the teams not quite ready for the Senior Ulster Championship.

“You could also link in universities, as well as some under-20s; that’s the only chance to play it.”