In a way I was a strange choice for the Football Review Committee. As a player I didn’t want any change: not to championship structure, not to the game. Change meant a distraction from your preparation and focus.
I wanted to know in the morning what the rules of engagement were so that I could train to compete at the weekend or six weeks down the line or whatever. Change would affect my team and where I would be as a player. All you wanted was certainty around those things. Surveys would come out from the GPA and for me it was always, no; no; no.
Even my first year of retirement was influenced by still almost having a foot in the dressingroom. I appreciate why teams set up the way they do and why they feel required to play in a certain way. I think most of those engaged in the GAA understand that, but it comes to a stage where we had to ask, is there any way of making this more enjoyable? For players, spectators, everyone?
Over the last number of years – it has not just suddenly happened this season – football has been getting more and more difficult to view as a spectacle.
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I went to a couple of hurling matches in the summer. What struck me was yes, the contest for the ball but also the speed – the quickness of movement from A to B, the defensive third into the attacking third. Obviously the sliotar moves a lot quicker and longer but you feel over the past couple of years the football transition has become very, very slow for lengthy phases of the game. You look around Croke Park and other venues and there are people in the crowd able to have conversations before the ball gets as far as the attacking zone.
We looked at the statistics from GAA Insights in terms of where the game is mostly played – in the middle third – the number of handpasses, which have increased exponentially; the number of uncontested kickouts, also up.
The corner stone of the enhancements we were looking to bring to the table was to make the game more enjoyable to watch and play. The sandbox trials to date have suggested a game played at a much higher tempo, which incentivises teams that want to attack quickly. At the moment with the best will in the world those teams are very easily slowed down and forced into lateral play. If you put 15 bodies along the top of your own D no matter how quickly the opposition intend to attack they can be stopped.
All of the feedback, whether data from the last 11 years of championship matches or the thousands of survey responses and emails from the public, bear witness to the move to patient patterns of play and being careful with possession. The number of uncontested kickouts is an indication: in the absence of a contest the ball is conceded so the defending team can drop back.
Patience is at the heart of it: the defending team in not pressing and the attacking team in the slowness of their build-up and the resulting increase in the number of handpasses. The play is becoming more risk-averse. The challenge was how to address that.
Reaction to the sandbox games has generally been that we are now beginning to see good, free-flowing games of football rather than an entirely new departure. One of the things to emerge from the public was not that they wanted to see a new type of game. They wanted to see an emphasis on long-range scores, kicking and catching as key skills in the game.
When Gaelic football is played well it is as good as any sport in the world. We set out to see if we could redirect the game, not to radically change it.
The seven rule changes are largely interdependent, essentially a package. Four games over the weekend with players representing their province will see the trials go up a gear and also be exposed to a large television audience. The remit for all of this is to make football the most enjoyable game to play and to watch. As Jim Gavin has said on plenty of occasions, that is our North Star.
With the interdependency it is hard to say which rules are more impactful. People have personal preferences and many love the tap and go. When you see a back bursting out of defence and getting fouled that ability to see space in front and take a solo stops the penalised team’s defence getting back and regrouping. That can be almost breathtaking to watch and the attacking team get a deserved advantage.
The goalkeeping changes are also effective. Kickouts have to travel 40 metres and that definitely leads to more contests for the ball.
Restrictions on ‘keepers’ handling – they are only allowed take passes from a team-mate when both are within their large rectangle – are to address situations when teams roll the dice and press really high. As aggressively as they do that the six defenders can always get the ball away to the goalkeeper and then play becomes a long-winded game of ”piggy in the middle”. They have become so accomplished at this that the six forwards are virtually wasting their time trying to put pressure on them. This redresses the balance.
We weren’t simply limiting the expanded role for goalkeepers because there was acceptance that when they attack it creates excitement – both through their presence farther up the field but also in the space they leave behind when that risk-reward calculation is made. So we have allowed them to receive passes inside the opposition half of the field.
Those different roles for the goalkeeper are in contrast. In their own half it needs to be curtailed whereas in the other half their involvement is to be encouraged, as it is something the stakeholders viewed positively.
At the start I probably took a bit more convincing about the three-up rule until I saw it in action. The first benefit is that you have three people to kick the ball to when you win possession. But that hasn’t turned out to be the biggest benefit, which has been the impact on the flow of the game. Speed and space are created by having only 11 opponents between the 65 and the goal plus the width of the pitch, which is 90 metres.
Trying to defend that is far more challenging and leaves greater space for attackers wanting to take on their man or be a bit more creative with a kick-pass – in other words teams going for the jugular.
So the weekend will be very important. Will the TV audience find the game more enjoyable to watch?
It is only a programme of four matches and the ideas won’t be properly stress-tested until counties are playing week in and week out in the National League next spring. Players will learn from the first game and a bit more from the second and so on. Only at the end of the league will we get a fuller picture of how the rules are working but I believe this weekend will immediately showcase a more enjoyable game that can catch the imagination of the football public.
– Michael Murphy is a member of the Football Review Committee
