All-Ireland Senior Camogie Championship

infobox football tournament
current =

founded = 1932
region = Ireland (Camogie Association of Ireland)
number of teams = 7
current champions = Cork (23rd time)

The All-Ireland Senior Camogie Championship is the premier round-robin and knock-out competition in the game of camogie played in Ireland. The series of games are organised by the Camogie Association of Ireland and are played during the summer months with the All-Ireland Camogie Final being played on the second Sunday in September in Croke Park, Dublin. The prize for the winning team is the O'Duffy Cup. [cite web |url= All-Ireland Senior A Championship - O'Duffy Cup|title=http://www.camogie.ie/AboutCamogie/ChampionshipHistory/tabid/61/Default.aspx |accessdate=2008-04-07] The current champions are Cork,who beat Galway by a score of 2-10 to 1-8 in the All-Ireland final on September 14, 2008.

Format

The county is a geographical region in Ireland, and each of the thirty-two counties in Ireland organises its own camogie affairs.

The camogie championship qualifying structure works as follows:

Counties Participating: Seven Counties shall participate in the Championship. These are Cork, Dublin, Galway, Kilkenny, Limerick, Tipperary and Wexford.

Round-robin series: The seven counties participating shall play each other once with one county receiving a bye in each of the seven rounds due to the uneven number of teams in the competition.

All-Ireland Semi-Finals: The four top teams from the round-robin series shall be drawn to play each other in two semi-finals.

Top Winners

Dublin have won the All-Ireland Senior Camogie Championship the most times – twenty-six titles as of 1984. They won the very first All-Ireland title in 1932 and went on to dominate the competition for the next fifty years. Between 1948 and 1955 they won eight consecutive titles in-a-row. Two years later in 1957 Dublin began another great run of success which ended in 1966 with the capturing of their tenth consecutive All-Ireland title. Had it not been for defeats in 1947, 1956 and 1967 it is reasonable to assume that Dublin could have captured twenty-one All-Ireland titles in succession. ‘The Dubs’, however, have gone into decline over the last two decades and haven’t won the All-Ireland since 1984.

For a twenty-year period from 1974 until 1994 the Kilkenny camogie team dominated the championship. During those two decades the team collected twelve All-Ireland titles. Like Dublin’s story Kilkenny have also gone into decline and they haven’t won an All-Ireland title since 1994.

Since the turn of the twenty-first century both the Cork and Tipperary camogie teams have dominated the All-Ireland championship. Since 1997 at least one of these counties have appeared in the All-Ireland final every year. Between 1999 and 2006 Tipp won five All-Ireland titles from eight consecutive final appearances. Since 1997 Cork have won six All-Ireland titles, their lastest coming in 2008.

Six counties - Louth, Derry, Down, Limeirck, Mayo and Waterford – all hold the unfortunate record of appearing in All-Ireland finals without ever winning the O’Duffy Cup.

The following is a list of the top county teams by number of wins

All-Ireland Senior Camogie Finals

[cite web |url= All-Ireland Senior A Championship - O'Duffy Cup|title=http://www.camogie.ie/AboutCamogie/ChampionshipHistory/tabid/61/Default.aspx |accessdate=2008-04-07]

References

External links

* [http://www.camogie.ie/ "Cumann Camógaíochta na nGael"]