Malachy Clerkin: All four teams know there is an All-Ireland on offer, if they can reach out and grab it

Three games left and nobody has a clue. When Dublin were knocked out of the football championship by Galway, the great euphemism had it that the whole summer had been blown wide open. Which is exactly the sort of thing you say when you want to cough-cough past the fact that all the predictions of a few months back turned out to be a load of old hogwash.

Remember how it was? Remember the week after the league final when nobody could see beyond Dublin, Kerry and Derry when it came to picking the race for Sam? We all did our research, crunched our numbers, sucked the top of our pencils and delivered our verdict. A three-horse race. No further questions.

Ahem. This country has had enough of experts, as the man said. Two of the horses haven’t even made it to the semi-finals. Which, when you consider how hard it is for contenders to get knocked out of the competition before the last 12, means that Derry and Dublin barely finished the first circuit. The race for Sam Maguire started in earnest a fortnight ago and as soon as the pace hotted up, they both cried enough.

[ Here’s to the football championship, the great clanking rust bucket of the Irish sporting summerOpens in new window ]

We should have seen it coming. Some of it, at least. Dublin’s age profile and the lack of variety in their forward line ought to have rung louder alarm bells than was the case. Derry’s insistence in going eyeballs-out from January onwards had to carry a risk, especially with a panel that still lacks depth. But for all that, it was still difficult to imagine they both wouldn’t still be standing when the podium places were being sorted out.

Partly this is because we have come to know no different. For a long time now, we have been conditioned to expect the same faces to arrive at this point in the season. Dublin haven’t missed an All-Ireland semi-final since 2009. Kerry have been in 10 of the last 12 including this time around, Mayo were in 10 of 11 between 2011 and 2021. To a slightly lesser extent, Tyrone were usually on the premises too – six semi-finals in nine seasons between 2013 and 2021.

The point is, we went a long time without novelty being part of the deal. The teams everyone assumed would be involved at the end generally tended to turn up. Dublin were a monolith for pretty much all of it and when they weren’t, Kerry swooped in to gather up a couple of All-Irelands. Ho-hum.

And even as that has started to fracture a little since the start of this decade, the sense of inevitability has still hung like low cloud. Nine different counties have made All-Ireland semi-finals since 2020 but that feels like a slightly contrived statistic, the sort of thing that causes psephologists to go looking for noise in the numbers.

Ask yourself this – how many of the nine have gone into these weekends as realistic All-Ireland contenders? You wouldn’t have said it about Cavan or Tipperary in 2020, certainly. Even the most one-eyed supporters didn’t think it about Derry in 2022, nor about Monaghan last year. A semi-final appearance was an achievement in itself for each of those teams at the time, an act of wringing the very last drop out of their seasons.

This year is different. The attraction of the 2024 semi-final line-up lies in the fact that you can’t dismiss any of the four teams left. A fortnight from now, one of them will be standing on the steps of the Hogan Stand with the canister in the air. Go on – say which one it won’t be. Double-dare ya.

[ Darragh Ó Sé: No team is thinking about bonus territory but I still think it will be a Kerry v Galway finalOpens in new window ]

Kerry are favourites without having done a whole pile to deserve the tag. Armagh are the outsiders of the four, partly because they’re playing Kerry, partly because they’re in their first semi-final in 19 years. Galway and Donegal are much of a muchness on the other side of the draw.

Crucially, all four are being led by managers who belong to the biggest days the sport has to offer. Jack O’Connor, Kieran McGeeney, Jim McGuinness, Pádraic Joyce. All-Ireland winners all, either as player or manager. None of them will arrive at Croke Park with impostor syndrome. None of their players will get off the bus feeling anything less than convinced that this is there for them.

More than anything, that’s why this weekend feels so pregnant with possibility. The stakes feel higher than all those years when Dublin were just rolling over everyone. There’s a reason why the Mayo public started to lose faith after the Tyrone defeat in 2021 rather than all the close shaves against the Dubs in the 2010s. Mark it down – in years to come, players from the three counties that don’t get it done in the next fortnight will be pointing to this as the one that got away.

Here’s hoping it emboldens them. Time and time again, the lesson of knock-out football in Croke Park has been that trying to bore the other crowd into submission generally fails. You can compete, you can hang in there, you can make the closing stages a bingo draw and hope your number comes up. But actually winning tends to take a bit more than that.

That said, it should be pointed out that the stats people and numbers geeks aren’t exactly predicting fireworks here. A couple of 0-17ish to 1-12ish scorelines are where the bookmakers have set their expectations and who are we to say that they’re the fools and we’re the geniuses?

But the arc of history is long and we like to tell ourselves that it tends towards the teams who get on the front foot in these matches, who use the speed of the pitch and the size of the occasion to elevate their game. That rang true when the Dubs were rocking and rolling. Let’s see what this year’s crop thinks about it.

Three games to go. Anyone’s summer, if they reach out and grab it.