Setanta left frustrated following hurling championship ‘no show’ 

Setanta travelled to Inishowen on Friday night for a Senior Hurling Championship clash with Buncrana but arrived at the venue only to find that their opponents weren’t present. 

Player/boss of the reigning county and Ulster Intermediate champions, Niall Cleary, says his side received no official correspondence from Buncrana or the Donegal Competition Controls Committee (CCC) that the game wouldn’t be going ahead. 

Cleary says it’s the second time this has happened to his club in recent weeks and it’s something he says needs to urgently be looked at. 

He explains that the logistics of players being available for Friday night games and the travel involved means both they and the club are out of pocket when this type of scenario occurs.  

Coincidently, the Buncrana footballers, chasing promotion to Division 1, had an important league fixture for the same evening, at home, to Red Hughs. So an alternative venue, Foden, home to Carndonagh, had to be arranged. 

“It’s very disappointing,” said Cleary. “It was probably two-fold for them (Buncrana). They have five or six dual players and having been beaten by MacCumhaills last week they’d nothing really to play for.  

“This fixture was a bit of a mess from the start. On Monday, it was on the website that the game was on Friday. It was changed then close to midnight to Sunday, midday. 

“Players had planned around the Friday with the All-Ireland hurling semi-finals and even holidays and weekends away. On Wednesday, it was  to Burt. Thursday, the time was changed again. 

“At 11pm that night, they said they couldn’t get a neutral venue so the game would be fixed for midweek next week. 

“If that had to happen the second stage of the championship was starting so you were looking at a game Wednesday and Friday night. 

“We didn’t actually find out until Friday at 3pm that the game was to be in Carndonagh at 8pm later that same evening. 

“I’d spoken to Buncrana in the last few days and while it wasn’t an ideal situation we agreed to go with what the CCC had arranged. 

“We have one lad, Denim Rowan come home from Germany and Ryan Callaghan back from London. We landed to the pitch in Carndonagh and as we looked to warm up we were told there is no game. 

“The funny thing is Buncrana were actually playing Red Hughs and we ourselves could have had four lads at the football had we known our game was off.

“Not to get word from Buncrana themselves was also very disappointing. It’s a long way to travel on a Friday evening”.

Cleary’s gripe comes hot on the heels of Carndonagh’s Cathal Doherty, also a player/boss, airing his grievance on social media with the shoe-horning of SHC games after they had to play both an important league football fixture and a hurling championship game on the Friday and Saturday of last week.

Between both codes, Carn had eight dual players caught in the middle there. 

“All Carndonagh were asking for was 48 hours between the matches and that’s very reasonable,” Cleary added. “From a player welfare point at least, you’d think they would have got that”.  

Offaly native Cleary says the frustrating thing about the entire episode is that on the master fixture list, there wasn’t meant to be any football games fixed for this weekend and it was a catch-up week. 

“Red Hughs were left with two catch-up league games to play but it’s the hurling championship that suffers. I understand football is the bigger sport in Donegal but all you look for is a bit of fairness.

“It is something that needs a closer look at. I understand fixtures is a tough thing to map out but the hurling championship is really suffering right now. 

"The CCC and hurling board needs to really look at this for next year. They are trying to run off the hurling before the football and it’s still clashing. So the hope is there is a sit down ahead of 2025 and we get some structure to it”.

Efforts to contact the CCC for comment on Sunday proved unsuccessful.