Kieran Shannon: Dublin's win was that rarest of GAA treasures - the championship shock

We’d been burned by Dublin too often to dedicate or waste any further time involving them. The five previous times they’d made it out of Leinster they’d lost their next game by an average of nine points – and one of those was to Laois in a preliminary quarter-final.

In four of those five games they hadn’t even raised a green flag as well as a gallop, and in the one they did manage to find the net in, Clare still annihilated them by 18 points on a dreary Saturday afternoon in the Gaelic Grounds two years ago that we wished we’d spent somewhere else.

And it wasn’t like any of those sides that beat them were world-beaters. None of them – Tipp in 2014, Laois in 2019, Cork in 2021 and 2024, Clare that time in 2023 – went on to win the All Ireland.

Limerick were world-beaters – or at least had been. So though we didn’t doubt that Niall Ó Ceallacháin had manfully facilitated some incremental improvement of his team in the tradition of a line of predecessors, it had a ceiling, and we weren’t going to devote any time to the academic matter of whether that marginal improvement was going to be reflected in their margin of defeat being single or double figures.

I duly volunteered to collect the takeaway for the family and get some goodies for a movie we’d watch together after I’d first taken in Cork-Dublin in the football online. On the way in I didn’t even have the radio on, deviating from the habit of a lifetime of being in a car any weekend afternoon games were on. The idea of Dublin-Limerick or Cavan-Kerry being anything more than a formality never occurred to me.

I was in an off-licence where the radio was playing when I was reminded of the curtain raiser to Cork-Dublin. It sounded like it was close. The shop assistant told me Dublin were actually ahead. Then the final whistle went. Dublin had actually won! And though the man was a stranger and no doubt back in 2018 had been as delighted as I was when Limerick had made their breakthrough, we laughed and high-fived each other.

It wasn’t like we were anti-Limerick, though we happened to be in Ennis and I happen to be from Cork. And it wasn’t like we were for Dublin.

While it went unsaid, we were celebrating that most an rud is annamh is iontach of wonders that the GAA and sport can conjure: the Championship Shock.

Several of them I’ve been there for in person, experienced that creeping realisation that the impossible could actually be possible. A 2004 All-Ireland football quarter-final double-bill will always be a standout: First, Tom Brewster and Fermanagh shocking an Armagh team that had been bidding to reach a third All-Ireland final in a row and was starting out on winning three Ulsters in a row; then Ciarán MacDonald and Mayo tripping up a Tyrone team that were reigning All-Ireland champions. As seismic as the same weekend in 2010 would be with Down ambushing Kerry and Pat Gilroy’s Dublin finally slaying their Tyrone dragon, 2004 was scarcely fathomable.

In 1989 we went to see Galway and Tipp but came out of Croke Park thinking the best and certainly most joyous part of the day was witnessing Antrim’s Olcan McFetridge score that on-his-knees goal to bring Offaly to theirs.

Others we’ve watched on the TV. There was no other way to take in all those surprises in the covid championship: Mark Keane, Cavan, Tipp.

Others we followed on the radio. Last Saturday evening I had a flashback to a July weekend back in 1992, away with a friend and in the car listening to a remarkable drama in the Limerick Gaelic Grounds unfold: the Clare footballers beating Kerry in the Munster final. As the years have gone on we can dismiss that Kerry team (and thus slightly downplay Clare’s win) as being in the middle and representative of the county’s famine years but a month earlier they had hammered the favourites for the All-Ireland, Cork, by 10 points in Cork. It was a stunning moment then and remains a stunning achievement by Clare now.

For some reason though, possibly because of some of the counties involved and because I was Justin McCarthy’s Boswell a couple of decades ago, I found myself in that off-licence transported to a place and time when I wasn’t even born.

At the outset of the 1966 championship, Cork were going on 12 years without winning the All-Ireland. Tipperary were fancied to win their fifth in six years.

A couple of weeks out from their opening match against Clare, Cork were having a meal in the Kilkenny Imperial Hotel after playing a challenge game against the locals when suddenly their team trainer, Jim ‘Tough’ Barry, burst in, “like a schoolboy just after hearing the war is over,” McCarthy would recall.

Lads, Barry told his players, ye’ll never believe it! Didn’t Limerick beat Tipp today!

Barry was right. His players didn’t believe him. Or when he told him that the radio had said Éamon Cregan had taken the Tipp defence for three goals and five points.

“But then lads started to leave the table, calls were made: the story was confirmed,” McCarthy recounted. “A huge buzz went around the room. Fists were clenched, voices became excited: the world had changed. Jim summed it up. ‘Lads, they’re out of the way now. Ye can beat the rest of them. It’s up to yourselves.’” 

Pat Ryan and his team are far too modern and sophisticated and process-oriented to act and talk as giddily as Barry and his young charges did nearly 60 years ago. It’s dangerous to think too far down the road as Limerick themselves might in the coming months privately concede and that Cork team of ’66 could also testify; just like this year, Cork drew with Clare in their opening game of that summer, requiring McCarthy to goal from a late 35-yard free to remain in the championship.

But Liam Cahill wasn’t being just mischievous when he strategically quipped that Pat Ryan would be the one man smiling on Saturday evening. Cork now are unquestionably the “raging hot favourites” to win the All Ireland and to end a famine that is even longer than the one McCarthy and his namesakes Gerald and Charlie helped finish in ’66. The world has changed, just like it did in 2004 when Armagh and Tyrone both crashed out of the football championship on the same day, and in 2013 when neither Kilkenny nor Tipp made it through to the last four of the hurling championship.

But it’s not just Cork supporters that would being buoyed upon learning of Limerick’s demise on Saturday. The players and managements of the other three teams will just like Barry in ’66 feel that they can beat what’s left. That this has opened up for them, that it’s there for them.

Dublin in particular will believe that. If they can beat Limerick with 14 men, why can’t they beat everyone else? We’ve seen teams struggle on their next day out after taking a massive scalp – the Meath footballers upon shocking Dublin back in May, Mayo upon blocking the seven-in-a-row in 2021 – but Philly McMahon can’t accuse Ó Ceallacháin and his men of over-celebrating their win last Saturday, just as Anthony Daly’s Dublin didn’t either upon shocking Kilkenny in 2013 and followed it up by beating Galway well in the Leinster final.

Ó Ceallacháin was right in saying their win will mean little if they don’t back it up with another win the next day out; Mayo’s 2021 win over Dublin hasn’t lasted in the memory because of how poorly it was followed up.

Yet it was something in itself: the biggest shock the hurling championship has known since either Offaly won their first Leinster in 1980 or McFettridge terrorised them in ’89.

It’s because of the identity of the vanquished: this Limerick team is one of the best two teams the sport has known since that Tipp team that were foiled by Limerick in ’66 (claims they may have been even better than Cody’s Kilkenny will have to be revised given Henry Shefflin still has twice as many All Ireland medals as any of Kiely’s crew).

And it’s because of the manner of it. Earlier this summer, this column and others wrote about how a side playing with 14 men for much of the game was now doomed: that opposing teams were too scientific and strategic to not exploit that advantage. How we’d never again see a side outsmarted and outfought like Limerick were by Wexford in 1996. Especially a side as smart and battle-hardened as a Limerick team coached by Kinnerk and Kiely.

Yet that’s we got. That’s what Dublin did.

Shocking. Stunning. Glorious.