David Reidy of Clare celebrates after scoring his side's second goal during the Munster GAA Hurling Senior Championship Round 1 match between Clare and Cork at Zimmer Biomet Páirc Chíosóg in Ennis, Clare. Photo by Brendan Moran/Sportsfile.
By John Harrington
That old sporting canard that there’s no such thing as a safe lead in hurling was doing the rounds again after Cork and Clare got the Munster Hurling Championship off to a flier in Ennis three weekends ago.
It says a lot about how we view the game that there was no real shock about how Cork conspired to let a 12-point half-time lead slip and were perhaps fortunate to ultimately snatch a draw with the last puck of the game.
We have an image of hurling as being a sport of beautiful chaos where these sort of wild swings in matches are par for the course, but that’s not the case.
Clare’s comeback against Cork that day was only the second time in the last six years that a team has come from so far behind in championship hurling.
That information comes courtesy of former Cork hurler, Dr. John Considine, who is a lecturer on Economic Decision Making and the Law and Economics of Competition at the Cork University Business School at UCC.
He along, with co-authors from UCC and Croke park (John Eakins, Peter Horgan and Conor Weir), produced a study quantifying the changes in ‘Game States’ (the ahead/behind/level state of games) of all 163 senior inter-county hurling championship matches over the last six years (2019 to 2024) and how these fluctuations impact the overall game narrative and scoring.
It’s a testament how exciting a sport hurling is that 50% of matches have had nine changes in Game States or more and that 10% of matches are decided in the final two minutes before the referee blows their final whistle.
But his research also shows that there is in fact such a thing as a pretty safe lead in hurling.
Only once had a team come back from 10 points down to win a championship match in the last six years – Limerick against Tipperary in the 2021 Munster Final.
That represented .8% of all the games from 2019 to 2023. The percentage of matches that were overturned to win from nine, eight, and seven point deficits was negligible too.
It’s only when you get down to a five-point lead that you could say it’s not all that safe. 16 per cent of matches from 2019 to 2023 saw a team overcome a five-point deficit to win the game.
“At the moment people are probably influenced by an availability bias,” says Considine. “They saw Clare coming back from 12 points to get a draw so they're probably saying that, 'Jesus, 12 points is no lead in hurling.'
“But actually if you look at the vast majority of games, it is! The only other time it has happened since 2019 was in 2023 when Galway reeled in Dublin.
“But people will remember the Cork and Clare one for a couple of reasons. One, it was on television. So now you have this element of, it could happen, it could happen, and there's that element in there.
“People will remember that in the same way they remember All-Ireland Finals with great comebacks like Offaly's. They remember them way more than what happens on average. That's what makes sport exciting.”
Clare supporters react to their side winning a late free in the closing moments of the Munster GAA Hurling Senior Championship Round 1 match between Clare and Cork at Zimmer Biomet Páirc Chíosóg in Ennis, Clare. Photo by Brendan Moran/Sportsfile.
If sport is all about excitement then it might seem like a strange bedfellow for Economics which has been termed ‘the dismal science’, but there has long been strong links between the two.
One of the most seminal texts on Economics is ‘The Theory of Games and Economic Behaviour' by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern which was published in 1944 and was based on the premise that in parlour games like poker, competitors always play their best possible strategies.
In the decades that followed economists followed von Neumann’s lead and populated their models with decision makers that make their best possible decisions, but the economic crash of the late noughties suggested that, in fact, humans can’t be relied on to make the best possible decisions.
We’ve long known that to be the case in sport, which is why economists are now using evidence from sporting contests and games to develop more realistic models.
Nobel prize winning economist, Richard Thaler, studied tv shows like Golden Balls and Deal or No Deal to prove that people don’t behave like von Neumann’s ideal, while Tobias Moskowitz examined millions of decisions by baseball umpires to show that their decisions were biased in favour of the player behind in the count.
Considine himself has published a study in the Journal of Sports Economics that showed hurling referees behave in a similar way to those baseball umpires.
After examining All-Ireland Championship matches from the years 2016 to 2018 he found that:
1: The team behind on the scoreboard is statistically more likely to get the next free.
2: The further they’re behind the more likely again they will be to get the next free.
3: The team that has been awarded less frees is statistically more likely to be awarded the next free.
Cork manager John Considine during the 2018 Munster GAA Minor Hurling Championship Round 3 match between Cork and Limerick at Páirc Uí Chaoimh in Cork. Photo by Piaras Ó Mídheach/Sportsfile.
“I teach a first-year module on decision-making,” says Considine. ”It's a look at how these decisions are being evaluated, be it game-shows or games.
“When you're looking at decision-making there’s been experimental stuff where you take people to labs and ask them questions but when you take people into the lab it's not real.
“It’s better to see how people behave in real settings so sport is ideal. We tend to look at the big data out there on how people make decisions.
“The stuff we did on refereeing refers to work done on baseball umpires. They took data from baseball umpires, loan officers who grant loans, and asylum judges in the US and they found they all make the same type of error in that if they granted a few they’re more likely to incorrectly not grant the next one.
“Sport is ideal because the data is public, you don't have to conduct experiments, you don't have to get ethical approval, it's all out there.
“The American sports are especially brilliant for this. You can watch quarter-backs and the decisions they make. For the last 20 years there has been an explosion in the use of sports data for examining elements of Economics.
“Not just necessarily the Economics of the sport, it's more about decision-making and what they do. There's huge literature there.
“That's why it's a great help to the Economics side. It's basically a lab to see how people behave, whether it's the referee or the players. There's great stuff there.”
Laois goalkeeper Enda Rowland saves a penalty from Antrim's Neil McManus during the GAA Hurling All-Ireland Senior Championship preliminary round match between Antrim and Laois at Parnell Park in Dublin. Photo by Seb Daly/Sportsfile
Considine knows that when a penalty is now taken in senior inter-county championship hurling it will be scored 84% of the time (based on the conversion ratio in the 2024 championship).
Statistical analysis has long been used in Economics to make predictions and the same is now true in sport, but applying probability to human behaviour can be an inexact science.
“Probably the most famous economist of the 20th century, John Maynard Keynes, said that what we do we do on animal spirits and we should never forget that,” says Considine.
“The lads who are taking penalties don't work out probabilities. It's all very well to be a Monday morning quarter-back but when you're under pressure in Croke Park then psychological factors are way bigger than thinking straight and rationality.
“You try to get players to behave rationally and to make good decisions, but you know full well that when the pressure comes you have to have it so burned into their system that they don't have to make decisions. You save their decision making capacity for bits and pieces but by and large they are programmed to go with the game-plan at given points in time and you're guarding against psychological issues moreso.
“After the All-Ireland Final I would bet a penny to a pound that what's said at half-time in the winning dressing-room isn't too much different to what was said in the losing dressing-room.
“But of course we want to know that someone stood up and there was a heroic speech made because that's what we want and that's what we like.
“We're back to animal spirit, that's what drives us.
“If you look at the stats, lads shouldn't be scoring from the corner flag. But they'll get a score from the corner-flag and the commentators will go berserk and everyone who saw it will remember it.
“Eamonn O'Shea had a great line about that. He said if you score from the corner-flag there will be a huge cheer and everyone will tell you that you're great.
“But if you miss from the centre you'll never be allowed forget it either. You should be encouraging lads to shoot from the centre and not the corner-flag, but we love the other stuff.
“When you collect the stats you're only measuring on balance what happens. But you don't know in a specific situation what will happen.
“The stats show that if you smoke there's a good chance that it will damage your health, but there's always somebody who smoked over 20 a day who lives to over 100 and that's the one that people will remember.”
Or how the time Clare came from 12 points down to draw with Cork in the 2025 Munster Senior Hurling Championship proved that there's no such thing as a safe lead in hurling.
