Club Football 2026

[Behindthegoal]

Tullamore better team wiped ferbane kickout almost opposite to group game they have big experienced mgmt team for a reason small thing but watching clubber highlights ferbane were denied 2 2 pointers in first half gives as 1 so they should have been 2 up at ht and when goal went in would have been 5 up. Not saying would have changed result just highlighting. Dont think gap between teams is as big as it seemed on sunday but offaly football has a real big problem with the quality of teams

[elmoceltic]

2 x 2 pointers in first half?? Seen the highlights twice but didn't see 2 x 2 pointers

[ruletheroost]

2 x 2 pointers in first half?? Seen the highlights twice but didn't see 2 x 2 pointers

I think he’s referring to the two scores, one from play and one from a free, where Johnson’s foot was on the line and both should have been awarded as two-pointers.

Chris did a very good job refereeing the game, and I’m not sure those decisions would have changed the result, but they were missed.

[elmoceltic]

Think he's foot was over the line on both occasions but I'll agree to disagree.
Like you said I don't think it would have changed the result but who knows.

[Behindthegoal]

No im not for a second saying the result would have been different but being 5 up when the goak goes in would have been huge. And late on the gap was 4 when it woukd have been 2. Once any foot is touching the line its a two pointer?

[del]

The one from play was clearly inside and was never a 2 pointer . The free on the other hand was very tight on the evidence of the video it looks like a 2 pointer. So at most Ferbane would have been a point better off.
Don’t think any Ferbane people are clutching at these incidents as to be fair they know they were soundly beaten on the day.
They will come back as they always do a very resilient bunch

[biffinbanner]

neither were 2 pointers. both inside. i had a clear view.

[faithfulfanatic]

2 pointer rule is that you must have one foot on or outside the arc when kicking the ball.

Watching it back now and on both scores, Johnson's standing foot is clearly on the arc.

On the second one (free after 25:30), the ref signals the spot of the free as being just outside the arc.
Loneshark also acknowledges this on commentary that it is a great spot for the free.

Linesman Ger Keyes seems to tell the ref here that it is 2 but he is waved away.
Perhaps the ref is telling him that it can't be 2 as it was a free given inside the arc, but this contradicts where he awarded it from.

[Behindthegoal]

Well watch the clubber highlights on youtube then biffobanner because to me they are both clearly 2 pointers

[Anonymous1]

A bigger issue for Ferbane to address is the concession of two soft goals.

The first goal was similar to the one scored in the 2023 final. Three defenders following their men instead of one coming to close down the ball carrier. A foul and yellow card is always worth preventing a goal.

The opposite happens on the second goal, three defenders get sucked into the ball carrier and allow Hogan to slip in behind.

[biffinbanner]

i dont want to be arguing against ferbane getting extra scores!!. but i never heard any ferbane people cribbing about them after the game? and i talked to a good few. but maybe im wrong.i thought he gave the free outside but cian kicked it from marginally inside.

[Lone Shark]

It's been a while since I've had a few free minutes to post properly on here, so just catching up now....

(1) I looked back at the two-pointers by Cian in the final, I'd say the first one was marginal at best, I don't think it was a huge injustice to just give a point for it.

(2) The second one did look like an error, in that it's pretty clear that it was a legal two-point kick. So, the question becomes the spot of the foul, and if it was supposed to be a free from a foot outside the arc, or a foot inside it. On that, Chris Dwyer stands slightly indicted for neither using spray to mark it, or at least telling Cian the lie of the land before he kicked it.

(3) The reason there's no whinging out of Ferbane people is that while any proper football supporters understand momentum swings and all that, if you were at the game, you knew that Tullamore were just so much better than we were. Ferbane were a kick of a ball away in 2023 and 2025 and I did feel like an injustice was done in the 2024 final, all the more so when I watched it back. I'm not saying it was intentional, but a couple of bad calls got Tullamore through a game where on merit, I thought Ferbane deserved extra-time at the very least.

This year's final was a world apart from that, Tullamore were miles better. It was six on the scoreboard, and that understated the gap in performance on the day, IMHO. And if we had poxed a result out of it, Blues fans could well have pointed at the Ferbane goal and counted the steps, and the number they'd have come up with would have been bigger than four.

(4) I've had a few very short chats with Georgie since the final, but for obvious reasons, we didn't get into the weeds of the game. The man was gutted, as were the players, as they felt they didn't perform, there was no point in going beyond that now. This week was not the time to delve into kickout strategy, and whether it was a case of no plan B, failure to call on plan B, failure to execute plan B, or some other reason why plan B didn't work. If I was a team statistician, I'd take my time away and then analyse all that in detail over the winter, but suffice it to say Tullamore dominated the kickout battle, and they converted that supremacy into scores. I wouldn't get hung up on what exactly happened to lead to the misfire.

(5) Following on from the kickout thing, the reason I think this was the game where Cathal Flynn's absence made a huge difference, and why I think it's fair to mention it, is that Tullamore are a very good team, and there was always going to be some aspect of the contest where they would be much better than us. No, I wouldn't have guessed kickout would be that sphere, but that's not the point.

Games of football are about putting your strengths and weaknesses into a pot while the oppositions mixes theirs into their pot. Then you each throw in preparation, tactics, on-the-day performance and all the rest, and whoever has the best mixture at the end wins.

Cathal Flynn, in my opinion, is the most electric, exciting, talented footballer in Offaly, and I pray to God that some day, whenever it is, we get to see that again. In 2025, he was visibly hampered by his shoulder and Tullamore put John Furlong (who was also a lot healthier then than he was in 2026) and Furlong had players coming over to help, and still Cathal had magic moments, including his involvement in Ferbane's goal.

In 2026, Furlong was free to focus his energy on Jake Maher, which he did, albeit much of the time by fouling him. So no, it wasn't that our big weakness was the lack of a playmaker, but our biggest strength was taken away, and his absence both robbed us of those mercurial moments, but also freed up key Tullamore players to take on different roles and influence the game in other ways.

(5) The Tullamore discourse is happening in a way that it never did before, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, no-one talked about it before the post-Celtic Tiger resurgence because the disparity in numbers wasn't as great back then. Now Tullamore's population has exploded, the west of the county has been hollowed out, and the population growth in the North is happening in clubs that are either not reaching their new people (e.g. Gracefield) or who are building from a very low base (e.g. Daingean).

But more than this, we used to live in an era where the quality of the footballers wasn't everything, but it was nearly everything. Now, we might all bemoan the money that is spent on outside coaches in clubs, and going outside is no guarantee of getting a good coach, but we've all seen how the wrong management setup sets fire to a previously good team very quickly, so of course teams are going to go the extra mile to try and put in place the best option they have. Funding is exponentially more important in 2026 than it ever was before, and the graph is only pointing in the one direction.

When I was growing up in the latter end of my primary school years in Ferbane, we were the dominant club in the county and one of the top four or five in Leinster. And even with us, football didn't start until U-10 or U-12, and it was very simple stuff. We trained once a week for about four or five months, and we played a handful of games.

Good and all as they were, the adults trained on the field, and then lived life outside of that, looking after themselves well but not spending loads of money on doing so. Simply put, GAA clubs were cheap to run.

Now, you need to start your academies at U-6, and at those, you need to have a coach:player ratio of ideally as low as 1:6 at the younger ages, so you need a massive amount of volunteer effort, and that means you need more off-field volunteers in the form of coaching officers and children's officers, to co-ordinate all that. Every underage team needs plenty of gear, end of season parties, Supermacs is an integral part of post-match for a lot of games, you do a lot to keep the kids happy. You have trips to Croke Park for blitzes, you have all sorts of other costs. I cannot stress enough, most of these things are good and it's a great thing for Irish society that our kids get this incredible experience growing up (I could live with putting a lot less money in Pat McDonagh's pocket, but that's a different matter) but they cost money.

U-12 teams in 2026 train about as much as senior teams in 1986, modern club minor teams train about as often as middling county teams did 40 years ago, and if you don't have a floodlit training facility, a gym, a large indoor hall-type space, and an extensive backroom team, you're not at the races, or at the very least, you're chasing. Younger players will give up on you, since all the high-performacne podcasts, and everything they've been told, is that your preparation has to be spot on. So naturally, when they've been told that all their lives and then they go into a setup that is very much "do more with less", they will be inclined to say it's not worth the hassle, because they've been indoctrinated to believe that it's all about the 1% things.

Now a lot of those new, modern expenses are met by extra sponsors, but that all goes back to the same thing - there is a large pool of potential sponsors in Tullamore. You don't have too many places to look for the same kind of support in Doon or Pullough.

I don't know Tullamore's numbers, but there are a couple of clubs near me here in South Roscommon where I can tell you that their income and expenditure - nothing to do with capital projects, this is day-to-day spending ONLY - is north of a quarter of a million a year. And based on how they operate, and since they do make a genuine effort at hurling as well, I've no doubt Tullamore are in that bracket. Do you know who can't afford that? Small villages and rural areas picking from a community of less than 1,000 people.

Now let's factor in the lease on O'Connor Park, a lease deal that quite frankly, seems like it was originally drawn up by a combination of Tullamore's crack team of negotiators and one or two Offaly county board officials that dropped out of school at age 12 to go farming, and never got the hang of that oul' maths craic. Sure, you can give credit to Tullamore for managing their affairs well, but it's another leg up they don't need, and of course people will be resentful of that too, since indirectly, that's money coming out of every other club's pocket.

Tullamore's advantage in terms of population is huge when it comes to putting teams on the field, but it's gargantuan when it comes to revenue generation, which is now a far bigger factor in team success than it ever was before. Is there a single poster on this board who thinks that Limerick hurling would have won even a single All-Ireland if JP McManus didn't weigh in and transform the underage structures in the county?

Let's put it another way. Most clubs in Offaly have had outside managers and coaches by times - but there's only one that could afford someone of Stephen Rochford's stature.

All of that is why this discussion happens now, why it didn't before, and why it's not going to stop.

(6) None of this is Tullamore's fault, and Offaly would be much worse off if they weren't as efficient as they are. We're looking at a situation where the club could well provide five or six starters to an Offaly team in a league or championship fixture next year, of course that's preferable to our county town side languishing out of relevance. Drogheda teams are at nothing in Louth, Longford Slashers are well down the pecking order in Longford, I'd say a quarter of the population of Leitrim lives in Carrick and St. Mary's are going backwards, and now that Simonstown are relegated, O'Mahony's need to win the IFC final in Meath this weekend or else there will be no team from Navan playing senior football in the county in 2027.

We're not looking for that, but because we have so few other truly large clubs - realistically there's only Edenderry - if Tullamore are well-organised and with a decent share of talent, they're just miles ahead of nearly everyone else.

It's because of all this that I feel sorry for their players to an extent, because the bar for them to be celebrated as true greats is so much higher than it is for some others. Honestly, I don't know if even winning a Leinster title would be enough for Tullamore people to talk about their current team the same way Shannonbridge people talk about Vinny Mooney, Anthony Kelly, Fergal McEvoy and the rest of them. They probably have to win an All-Ireland to be seen the same way.

But that's what comes with playing a different game to everyone else.

(7) The divisional thing has been done to death, there are a couple of threads on it on here, and they just wouldn't work. Kerry are often cited as the reason why they should be tried, and now Kerry are pushing back on them too. We won't derail this thread into another talking shop on divisions. If someone disagrees, find that thread and we'll pick it up there.

(8) At the national level, if someone told me that Offaly had to amalgamate with Laois as part of a greater drive to give other teams in Leinster a better chance of competing with Dublin, it's fair to say I'd be apoplectic, and I'm sure most of ye on here would join me. I'd be straight into the car to stand outside the Leinster Council offices in Portlaoise with a can of petrol and a set of matches, ready to do a bit of self-immolation in protest.

So that's why at a smaller level, I'm loathe to tell clubs that they should join up, and for the same reasons that I don't think that an Offaly/Laois Frankenstein-like creation would be any more competitive than we are as a standalone right now, I'm not sure that it would be hugely beneficial. Clodiagh Gaels have got some traction certainly, but it hasn't worked out for Ballyskenach-Killavilla. Look at what happened to Ballinagar in the time since they voted themselves out of existence, only for Raheen to say they didn't want them?

People talked before about how Daingean parish should stay together at adult level, but the four clubs in Daingean Parish put out seven adult teams in the 2026 championships. The clubs of St. Broughan's put out five, the clubs of Na Fianna the same. That's not happening if you bundle all them together.

But then, my logic at a national level is that I would lose my s*** at the thought of someone messing with what I know as Offaly, so I'd feel hypocritical saying that it should happen to Dublin, and instead I think at county level, a lot could be done to level the financial playing field, and I don't know how you do that at a club level.

Yes, a second club in the town would be the ideal, though it would have to be an organic thing, like how Garrycastle grew out of Athlone, rather than something that was imposed on the area by a diktat from Offaly, Leinster or Croke Park.

Likewise, if Kilclonfert want to join up with someone, the members vote that way, and the club they join with has the same view and the same democratic mandate, I will support it, but it has to come from them, and them alone.



That's some amount of waffling, but that's what I'm here for.

[oneshot]

Surprisingly easy victory for Tullamore yesterday, As soon as Hogan scored that goal the final nail was in the Ferbane coffin. It knocked the stuffing out of them and Tullamore never let up in their intensity. They were relentless and fully deserving of their win. I feel sorry for Ferbane because they are by a margin the second best team in the county, big gap back to 3rd best. They have just a met a serious Tullamore machine. Tullamore will probably win 7 out of the next 10 championships at least. They have blooded a couple of new players this year and also the success of their second team in the Senior B also bodes well for them as a club. Lots of underage success as well and it really is daunting for the rest of the teams.
Disappointed they play away to the Dublin champions in Leinster, maybe its the right time to get them. I do think Tullamore are in the top 4 in Leinster with Dubs Champs, Kildare Champs and The Downs from Westmeath but maybe I am being bias.

they played the dublin champions last year in tullamore and were hammer big gap between offaly championship and dublins.

[Anon444]

Spot on LS.