The preamble to Saturday night’s final round of football qualifiers was coloured by the fact that Down had surprised Monaghan a few weeks previously and now had to go into Croke Park and repeat the trick. There is a strongly held view that it is very difficult for a team to play the same opponents twice and beat them on both occasions.
This has become a phenomenon only in the last 16 years since the qualifiers were introduced and whereas it has been possible since 2001 it doesn’t happen that frequently - on average less than one and a half times a season.
The sense of foreboding about having to line up the same opposition twice is borne out by a cursory glance at the statistics. Of the 23 re-matches (outcomes, not counting replays), 14 have been won by the side that lost the first day. This is especially pronounced when the first-time winners were clear underdogs on the day of their victory, which was the case with Down and Monaghan at the weekend.
A strike rate of 39 per cent for the winners of the first match in any subsequent meetings also includes fixtures where the successful team have been red-hot favourites on both occasions. There is no precedent for distant outsiders, who lose the first match bouncing back to surprise the favourites on the next day.
The re-match experts are Cork and Kerry, who in the last decade met 16 times in eight championships between 2002 and ‘09. On four occasions the provincial verdict was overturned and unfortunately for Cork, each time it was to derail their All-Ireland chances, in the 2002, ‘06 and ‘08 semi-finals and also in the 2009 final.
Famously in the very first year of the system, the new and eagerly awaited All-Ireland quarter-finals threw up three matches that had already taken place in the provinces, spoiling the novelty of the occasion.
At the time the draw wasn’t broadcast live and it became the equivalent of a parlour game to detect one of the abundant leaks and use it to disseminate the news before it was actually screened.
On the day of the very first quarter-final draw, the sense of disappointment was palpable despite the gem of a first Kerry-Dublin championship meeting in 16 years: Meath-Westmeath, Tyrone-Derry and Roscommon-Galway had all played earlier in the summer.
A bright spark suggested that the GAA use the ‘practice draw’ instead of the real one in order to spice up the last eight. Wiser counsel prevailed when pointing out that the percentage chances of keeping the deception under wraps would be between zero and one.
The nature of the discarded practice draw remains unknown and what would become a recurrent phenomenon of disappointed provincial champions - knocked out by a team from their own province - got under way with Derry beating Tyrone and Galway defeating Roscommon.
It’s happened five times to provincial champions all told: Meath losing to Kildare in 2010 and Tyrone twice dulling the sheen of a Monaghan Ulster title in 2013 and ‘15. Throw in Cork’s experiences against Kerry and you have a tidy amount of angst brought about by the qualifiers.
