LEVEL THE PLAYING Field.

The Ladies Gaelic Football x Lidl ad, ran religiously last year, might come to mind.

Or the Women’s GPA’s stinging Levelling The Field report from 2020.

Both of these campaigns may relate more to off-field matters; the ad visually representing the uphill battle that ladies’ Gaelic footballers and women in sport face in striving for equality.

It’s perhaps fitting that a few months later, on-field matters, at least, are pretty much level.

Meath’s monumental All-Ireland success last year broke the Dublin-Cork duopoly which had long been in place. From 2005 to 2020, one of the two counties lifted the Brendan Martin Cup. 

Cork won 11 titles in 12 years, Dublin the only county to break the reign of terror in 2010. The Sky Blues then took the mantle from 2017 onwards, before the Royals ended their bid for the perfect five in-a-row last September, against all odds.

Managers and players across the length and breadth of the country have been forecasting a wide open championship this summer, with the All-Ireland series kicking off this weekend.

“There are certainly five or six teams who genuinely have a chance,” Dublin boss Mick Bohan recently said, “while before you’d be paying token to that. You’d be saying, ‘Such and such is dangerous’ but you wouldn’t believe it. I do see the gap is tightening.”

Donegal manager Maxi Curran echoes those sentiments, his side having recently lost the Division 1 league final to Meath and the Ulster decider to Armagh, both on extremely narrow margins.

“This is my fifth year and I think it is the most level the field has ever been,” he begins. “Any one of four or five teams have proper serious aspirations.

“Galway have come under the radar they had a quiet league, changed management midway through, they got their [Kilkerrin-] Clonberne players back and got a good win over Mayo in the Connacht final. They probably hadn’t been spoken about at all and that’s just an example of one team.

“Armagh lost a Division 2 league final but came and scored 3-17 against ourselves so it is shaping up for a very good championship. The group stages will make it interesting with a provincial winner, a provincial runner-up and another team thrown in the mix. There will be more big games and interesting days ahead so it is shaping up to be a really good championship.”

How has it levelled out so quickly?

Dublin and Cork were unquestionably the Top Two for quite some time there, with Donegal among a sizeable chasing pack, but things feel very different now.

“To be fair to Cork they were probably always going to go through a period of transition,” Curran, formerly coach to the county men’s team under both Jim McGuinness and Rory Gallagher, reasons.

“They had such a serious group of players coming through at one time and they probably all left within the space of a couple of years so they were going to have to rebuild on the back of a lot of underage success.

“The Dublin thing was probably built on having come so close for so many years. They came with a team that experienced a lot of disappointment and the arrival of Mick [Bohan] brought a whole new element of professionalism to it.

“I think the management structures within the game has definitely improved and pushed on a lot, where you have a lot of people coming across from the men’s game. Not even just managers, S&C guys. Eugene Eivers was the S&C guy for Donegal in 2012 when they won the All-Ireland. He’s now the S&C [coach] with Meath and I think that’s no coincidence that they have come. Our own guy, Paul Fisher, would have been with the men for six years. That’s happening quite a lot.

“In fairness, we give out a lot about the structure at the top of the LGFA and the difference between boys and girls, but they have made moves to provide money for county boards to invest in the additional resources in terms of preparing the teams. People are starting to bear fruit now. They feel it’s probably quite level.”

“Then I think overall there’s a massive increase in the interest in ladies football and that has spread countrywide,” he adds. “Women’s sport in general is on the rise. More girls are playing, more girls are sticking at it and it has become quite a high-profile event now.

“It’s clear in Donegal, we’re probably the second most supported team in Donegal after the men’s team. That goes for the U20s, U21s, minor and all that. I think it has just been a continuous rise up the levels in terms of interest and then investment has come on the back of that, as well as a buy-in and commitment by players. I think it’s a countrywide thing and I think it’s great for the future of the game.”

Curran’s charges are now looking to bounce back from those recent disappointing decider defeats to the Royals and the Orchard county, and what better way to do so than to open their All-Ireland championship campaign on a high.

An outfit who have been so close yet so far in the business end in recent years, they face Waterford in Birr tomorrow evening [throw-in 5pm, live on TG4], with Cork also waiting in the wings in their group.

“There comes a point where every successful team will look at some turning point before, some loss or some defeat and they’ll say, ‘We got our stuff together,’” Curran notes. “The Tyrone men talk about the tanking they got in Kerry last year in the National League as a turning point for them. I think our girls have got to make the same decision now.

“They’ve got to say, ‘Right, enough is enough’. Sometimes you’ve got to just come out swinging and that’s what they’re faced with now. They have provincial medals in their pocket from before, so it’s not the world’s end if they don’t win this one, but they still have serious aspirations of a run in the All-Ireland series. They’ve just got to come out swinging now and put it behind them.”

“We feel we’re not that far away,” he later added. “A couple of tweaks here and there, and a rub of the green, I don’t think we should fear anybody.

“If you are going to win the All-Ireland you are going to have to beat big teams along the way and that happens to be the Munster champions for us.”