All-Ireland Senior Camogie Championship


The All-Ireland Senior Camogie Championship is a competition for inter-county teams in the women's field sport of game of camogie played in Ireland. The series of games are organised by the Camogie Association 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.
The senior camogie championship finals tends to be less eventful than their counterparts in the men's sport of hurling. There are lower score tallies and seldom is there a goal. Only fourteen points were scored by the winning team in the 2018 senior final, and most points in the game followed the awarding of frees. Ten points was sufficient to determine the winner of the 2017 senior final. The current champions are Galway, who beat Kilkenny in Croke Park, Dublin.

Participants

The county is a geographical region in Ireland, and each of 29 of the 32 counties in Ireland organises its own camogie affairs. Ten Counties currently participate in the Championship following the promotion of Intermediate champions Limerick at the end of the 2014 season. These are Clare, Cork, Meath, Dublin, Galway, Kilkenny, Limerick, Offaly, Tipperary and Wexford.

Format

The counties participate in a group series with the top four progressing to the All-Ireland Semi-Finals. The eight teams were divided into two groups of four in 2009. In every other year the teams were placed in a single group of between six and eight teams. The first two championships were played on an open draw basis until in 1934 the championship was changed to the traditional quadro-provincial structure traditional to Gaelic games. Following the withdrawal of Connacht from the inter-provincial senior semi-finals the competition changed to an open-draw knockout system in 1974.

Introduction of group system in 2006

The championship structure was changed from a knockout to a round-robin system in 2006. The system was retained despite some initial criticism. An anomaly occurred in four of the first six championships under the new format with the defeated All-Ireland finalists beating the eventual champions in the group stages, only to eventually lose to the same opposition in the All-Ireland final:
have won the All-Ireland Senior Camogie Championship the most times – twenty-eight titles. Dublin have 26 Titles. Dublin won their very first All-Ireland title in 1932 and went on to dominate the competition for the next thirty five 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. For a twenty-year period from 1974 until 1994 the Kilkenny camogie team dominated the championship. Between 1999 and 2006 Tipp won five All-Ireland titles from eight consecutive final appearances. Since 1998 Cork have won nine All-Ireland titles, their latest coming in 2018.
Six counties - Louth, Waterford, Down, Derry, Mayo and Limerick each appeared in All-Ireland finals without ever winning the O’Duffy Cup while London appeared in the All-Ireland final "proper", effectively a play-off between the All-Ireland champions and British provincial champions in 1949 and 1950. Three counties, Kildare, Cavan and Clare have contested the All-Ireland semi-final without qualifying for a final. The following is a list of the top county teams by number of wins.
CountyWinsYears wonRunners-upYears Runners-up
Cork281934, 1935, 1936, 1939, 1940, 1941, 1970, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1978, 1980, 1982, 1983, 1992, 1993, 1995, 1997, 1998, 2002, 2005, 2006, 2008, 2009, 2014, 2015, 2017, 2018201938, 1942, 1943, 1955, 1956, 1968, 1974, 1975, 1981, 1987, 1988, 1989, 1991, 1996, 2000, 2003, 2004, 2007, 2012, 2016
Dublin261932, 1933, 1937, 1938, 1942, 1943, 1944, 1948, 1949, 1950, 1951, 1952, 1953, 1954, 1955, 1957, 1958, 1959, 1960, 1961, 1962, 1963, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1984101935, 1941, 1947, 1967, 1976, 1978, 1982, 1983, 1985, 1986
Kilkenny131974, 1976, 1977, 1981, 1985, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989, 1990, 1991, 1994, 2016101970, 1995, 1999, 2001, 2009, 2013, 2014, 2017, 2018, 2019
Wexford71968, 1969, 1975, 2007, 2010, 2011, 201251971, 1977, 1990, 1992, 1994
Antrim61945, 1946, 1947, 1956, 1967, 1979101944, 1950, 1951, 1952, 1957, 1963, 1964, 1966, 1969, 1973
Tipperary51999, 2000, 2001, 2003, 2004101949, 1953, 1958, 1961, 1965, 1979, 1984, 2002, 2005, 2006
Galway31996, 2013, 2019151932, 1933, 1937, 1939, 1940, 1946, 1960, 1962, 1993, 1997, 1998, 2008, 2010, 2011, 2015
Louth021934, 1936
Waterford011945
Down011948
Derry011954
Mayo011959
Limerick011980

Highlights and incidents

Highlights and incidents through the history of the championship include:
The first numeral in the scoreline of each team is the number of goals scored and the second numeral is the number of points scored, the figures are combined to determine the winner of a match in Gaelic games. Match duration was raised from 40 minutes to 50 minutes for the 1934 championship and subsequent championships up to 1987, and from 50 minutes to 60 minutes for the 1988 and subsequent championships. The points bar was removed for the 1979 and subsequent championships. Teams were increased from 12-a-side to 15-a-side for the 1999 and subsequent championships.