Wednesday afternoon and the city is shining with promises of summer. High on the seventh floor of Irish Times towers, we plough through a spread of sandwiches, wraps and brownies before getting down to business. The football columnists for Championship 2025 are pawing the dirt and there’s only one place to get them off and running. The rules, the rules . . .
Irish Times: Have the new rules made it harder to judge where everybody stands ahead of the championship?
Conor McManus: I don’t think we’ve really seen a true reflection of any team just yet. Teams were getting used to the new rules in the first two or three rounds of the league and then in the latter stages obviously you had some teams starting to pull the handbrake. I don’t think you’ll see where teams are at maybe until the All-Ireland series.
Darragh Ó Sé: With the old rules you could be defensive up to a point to try to keep the score under a certain amount. But there are no safety wheels on the bike any longer so you have to cycle away. Last October, I was sitting at home and RTÉ were showing the Derry semi-final between Newbridge and Magherafelt, it was 1-1 to 0-3 at half-time. That was the watershed moment for me, I said, ‘Oh Jesus Christ, this has to stop’. You couldn’t watch it. It was a pet night, there wasn’t a breeze. It was horrendous stuff.
Irish Times: Have certain teams adapted better than others?
Darragh Ó Sé: Some players are struggling with it. Take someone like Seán Kelly – if Galway had him fit last year, they would have won the All-Ireland. He is so strong carrying the ball. But with the new rules, if you don’t kick it now you’re in trouble. Tom O’Sullivan from Dingle is the same – he’s soloing the ball up but that’s no good. You need to be going pop, pop, pop, moving it on.
Conor McManus: You look at Derry – their whole game plan was carrying the ball and transitioning. The rules probably don’t suit them that well. They had their game plan, Rory Gallagher had them conditioned in a certain way - you defend with 15, you attack with 15 and you run the ball. But now the running game is gone. It’s become a kicking game now and it’s not really suiting them.
Dean Rock: Teams are away on their training camps now and they’ll be looking at data because there is more data available to them after the league. They’ll have a better understanding of what works and what doesn’t work, so things will evolve naturally.
Conor McManus: There’s no control in games anymore. Last year, if you conceded a goal or something like that, you needed to get your hands on the ball. So there was a short kick-out back to the goalkeeper, everybody retreated and you were in control of what happened for the next three or four minutes. That’s gone now.
Dean Rock: It makes it very much an open championship. We probably sat here last year and talked about three or four teams who could win the All-Ireland. Whereas this year you’re thinking there are probably nine or 10 teams on any given day who could beat each other. The new game is all based around momentum, if you can get a massive purple patch on kick-outs and keep the opposition penned in their half, you have a great chance of being successful.
Irish Times: So where will teams find control, then?
Darragh Ó Sé: Kick-outs. Set-pieces are the only control you have. But some of the goalies are struggling. I noticed it in league games, you see some goalies scrambling to keep the ball in play before it goes wide because they don’t want to kick it out. If a fella’s doing that, you know he’s under pressure! The likes of Shaun Patton is confident, he knows what he’s doing. But there are a couple of fellas flapping too.
Conor McManus: Losing your own kick-out is a total catastrophe. Your whole defence is wide open. Everybody has to be out around the 40-metre arc so if you lose your kick-out it’s open season down the middle. Players are trying to break the old routine of how to play because in your head for the last 10 years it was all sideways, fist pass to the right, fist pass to the left. Most players still aren’t even thinking of looking up and yet the kick pass is on nine times out of 10.
Dean Rock: But the weather has got a lot better now and you can be sure most teams looked at how Kerry finished the league. They kicked the ball more than a lot of others so you know there are a lot of rewards there.
Darragh Ó Sé: Kerry were shocking in the first couple of matches though. I was above in Galway and the reality is if Galway put out a proper team we were relegated.
Dean Rock: Most teams are going to try and kick the ball a lot more than they did in the league because conditions are going to have an impact. It’s going to be a lot warmer. Players are doing more high speed running now. You are probably doing over 2,000 metres high speed. You would have been doing around 1,200m or 1,300m previously. And lads have trimmed down a lot – if you were playing at say 86-87 kilos last year, you’re probably playing at 83-84 kilos now because you have to be able to shift.
Conor McManus: There’s no break in the game. If there was a free kick last year, chances are the ball was going backwards so you had a chance to gather your breath. Now a free kick is solo-and-go and everybody’s just gone. There’s no such thing as a sweeper, there’s no such thing as a sitting number six.
Irish Times: Is the game less physical?
Conor McManus: Definitely, without a doubt. Over the course of the league I’d say there were far less flashpoints, far less tackles, far less general physicality in games.
Darragh Ó Sé: A lot of players are afraid of referees as well.
Irish Times: Is it a better game now?
Conor McManus: Oh yeah, I think so.
Darragh Ó Sé: Look at the amount of fielding in games. Fielding is one of the great skills of the game. I was above in the Armagh City Hotel a few years back, I had to do a favour for a fella from Pomeroy. It was one of these Q&A nights and during the chat we were talking about the mark. I said I’d love to see more fielding back in the game. Mickey goes, ‘Look, if you catch a ball and when you come down there are three fellas there ready to tackle you and they take the ball off you, that’s a skill.’
And I was thinking, ‘Where do you even start with that?’ I was about to answer that back, but I considered the fact I had a 250-mile drive ahead of me and decided I wasn’t about to get into an argument so I just said, ‘You know what Mickey? You’re right’. But it’s back in the game now and I think that can only be good.
Irish Times: Dean, have you played much under the new rules?
![Dean Rock: 'I've played three games [under the new rules] with the club. It's been good.' Photograph: Alan Betson](https://www.irishtimes.com/resizer/v2/WOTKRAVLGBHKLL3TY4XW3UQVOE.JPG?auth=ed7282f20ff63f99b90020eb349e18801f366d38afe72f55967e76184ddd0c03&width=800&height=533)
Dean Rock: Yeah, I’ve played three games with the club. It’s been good, I think the referees are actually enjoying it. You don’t hear stuff coming in from the sideline at the referees any more. The stuff coming in from the sideline now from managers and selectors is directed more towards their own players.
Darragh Ó Sé: I think some of the refs miss it! Coming home going, ‘I never got fucked out of it today’. Some fellas expect it.
Dean Rock: It’s much better. The only fear I’d have is that in some of the games in the early rounds of the championship, I think there could be a couple of cricket scores. The Galway game in New York. It’s on an astro pitch, New York haven’t played a game under the new rules yet, you’d imagine Galway could absolutely annihilate them. It could be anything.
Irish Times: They wouldn’t be playing each other but for the provincial system.
Conor McManus: If the Ulster championship wasn’t what it is, there’s a strong chance the whole provincial thing would already be gone.
Irish Times: If the provincials were disconnected from the Sam Maguire and played either at the start of the year or throughout the season like the FA Cup, would that be a solution?
Conor McManus: No, for it to carry any worth it has to have that link to the All-Ireland series. That’s the reason it carries worth. I think if you take that link away, if you dilute it, it diminishes it straight away.
Irish Times: Which teams actually wanted to win the league?
Darragh Ó Sé: I found it hard to figure out who was trying and who wasn’t at times. I knew Kerry were trying because Jack didn’t want to be relegated. And it’s after working out a dream for Jack, because Jack was under pressure over the winter. Jack had gone around and he’d asked a load of well-known fellas to come in as selectors. He asked Tomás, he asked Kieran Donaghy. But he couldn’t get men in with him. Jack wasn’t smelling well, Jack was on skid row.
So, he got a couple of guys eventually but there were lads from Kerry asking me who was this third selector, they didn’t know him. Had Kerry got relegated he would have been hammered this week. Nobody knew the pressure Jack was under but he’s in a great position now. He’s gone off to Portugal on a training camp, they won the league and he found out more about players in that game last Sunday than he did over most of the league.
Irish Times: Galway fell away too, even though they’d have loved a league title.
Darragh Ó Sé: I blame the system for them last year. They didn’t have enough time. Their three big players – Kelly, Damien Comer and Shane Walsh – they struggled to get the three of them on the pitch at the same time because they were going from week to week to week.
The season now is a load of shite, to be honest with you. I mean if you get to the latter stages, give them the respect of giving him two weeks to get prepared properly. But they don’t now because they want to have concerts in Croke Park. It’s rubbish. We sold out. We’re taking the soup in that regard.
Conor McManus: You’re rolling from All-Ireland hurling weekend straight into an All-Ireland football weekend, all on top of each other. You should have two weeks between every game once you get to the quarter-finals.
Darragh Ó Sé: Look there’s two ways to sort this out. Either put a roof in Croke Park and have concerts in September or give us back August altogether. You need August back. You coughed up the biggest, the best month of the year.
Irish Times: They did it for you guys though. For the club players.
Conor McManus: But sure nothing has changed! We played the county final last year two days before Halloween. That hasn’t changed one bit with the split season.
Dean Rock: They have a great product now. The game is really good and needs to be marketed really well. But the other part is the player side of it. It’s very intense, the build-up to big games is so intense. And then if you’re going week to week, that’s very difficult. It used to be great - you could play on a Sunday, go back to the hotel, have a few beers. You might even have a couple on the Monday. Give your mind and body a bit of time to recover.
Darragh Ó Sé: You get a bad hamstring injury now and you miss most of the championship. You break a finger and you’re gone.
Dean Rock: Cian O’Sullivan would never have played any games for us only for the old system. He’d tweak a hamstring and have three or four weeks to get ready and go again. He’d miss the whole group stage of the All-Ireland if it was the way it is now.
Conor McManus: It’s far too squeezed. You barely even know who’s playing this weekend. They’re just firing games in there. There’s what, 10 or 12 football games [nine, actually]? And the hurling league finals?
Darragh Ó Sé: The sun is shining outside today but it’s not championship weather. You see the sand is still jumping up off the ground. You have to do right by players as well and give them a fair shake in this.
Dean Rock: The amount of hours the lads are putting into it is frightening. Lads are doing at least 20 hours a week on video alone. Never mind the 20-odd hours going to or from training and then their day-to-day job. Looking at the opposition, looking at your training sessions, looking at every sort of thing.
Irish Times: You played last year Conor, that week to week experience – was it just less enjoyable?
Conor McManus: It’s not that it’s less enjoyable but you don’t have time to breathe, you don’t have time to recover. You’re going just from one game into the next. You play a game on a Saturday and you’re playing the following Saturday if you win. But the draw isn’t made until the Monday morning. So it’s Monday morning before you find out who you’re playing and then the video analysis starts for two or three days. Cramming everything in and trying to analyse everything. You’re trying to get yourself ready for a game week on week on week. It’s very exhausting.
Darragh Ó Sé: Brutal is what it is. Brutal.
Conor McManus: Even from a management point of view. I know from talking to Vinny [Corey] last year, that six or eight weeks in the depths of the championship was just mayhem. You didn’t even know who you were playing until the Monday and you’re playing on the Saturday. And you’re trying to condense a whole two weeks’ work into three days. Two sessions, basically.
Darragh Ó Sé: But even the mechanics of what you’re saying there. Let’s say Gordon and Malachy are doing the video analysis for me as the manager. Gordon might think one thing is worth looking at and Malachy might think another thing and then I might have my own idea of what way I want to do it. And ye’re firing shit at me here and I say, ‘Ah, fuck it, lads, go back to the drawing board there’. You don’t even have a time to do that – training is on a few hours after the draw has been made!
Dean Rock: That’s what happens! You don’t know who you’re playing against. So what ends up happening is that the video guys end up looking at and coding three different teams. These guys end up doing a load of work that’s never used.
The Irish Times: Just on the Dubs, how do you think they’re fixed?
Darragh Ó Sé: Dublin surprised me. I couldn’t understand why they didn’t go all out to win the league
Dean Rock: I think they did! It was probably an up and down league. There was no real consistency and you didn’t really know where they were at. They have a couple of question marks in defence and in midfield. That’s their big issue. Up front, I think the new rules will suit them. It’s just in terms of getting enough ball to them.
Conor McManus: Midfield is probably going to be their problem. They’re short on size. Brian Howard is an unbelievable midfielder. They’ve had Ciarán Kilkenny out there. But in terms of just physical size out there, they’re going to find it tough.
Dean Rock: They’re going to have to be innovative. If they don’t have the size out there, they don’t have the natural ball winners out there. Collie Basquel will come back in attack, Paddy Small, Con, Cormac Costello. Luke Breathnach was pretty good - a young lad coming in, he’ll add a lot of energy. So they have lots of options up front and won’t have a problem scoring. It’s just trying to keep it out at the other end.
Darragh Ó Sé: Pace up and down Croke Park could catch their midfielders. That’s the game.
Irish Times: That’s the thing, isn’t it? You need size around the middle but you have to be mobile too?
Darragh Ó Sé: It’s working for Joe O’Connor in Kerry. He’s not the biggest but again, I go back to this game, it’s suiting certain fellas. He was a sub the year they won it a couple years ago. And the old game, I couldn’t see him thriving in it. Genuinely couldn’t see anything in him to get to the next level. But funny enough, now the kick-outs are coming out, he’s getting confidence. He’s enjoying his football.
Conor McManus: He’s been a find for Kerry in this league.
Darragh Ó Sé: He’s been a huge find. He’s physical, he’s aggressive and he has energy. He’s exactly what you’re saying about - he can get up and grab that ball and he has the gas to go then straight away afterwards.
Dean Rock: You need plenty of energy around there. Joe O’Connor is similar enough to, say John Maher from Galway. Just industrious.
Conor McManus: This is where the goalkeepers are going to come into their own as the summer goes on. The Rory Beggans, the Shaun Pattons, the Shane Ryans – these guys who can put the ball 50, 55 yards into space.
Darragh Ó Sé: Shane Ryan doesn’t have that kick, though. That’s the worry for Kerry. His kick hangs too long. There’s time to get over to it so there’s traffic there by the time it comes down. Whereas Patton has that kick, Niall Morgan has that kick, Cluxton has that kick. I can’t understand how Dessie didn’t go and tell Brian Fenton he wasn’t letting him retire. Fenton could be the difference between winning an All-Ireland and not.
Conor McManus: Cluxton doesn’t have that range in his kick-out.
Dean Rock: No, and I think that’s a big thing with the new rules - being able to get it as far as possible so that it clears an extra line on the pitch.
Conor McManus: That’s where Beggan and Patton are going to come into their own. I would say as the summer goes on, particularly after the first couple of games, you’ll see kick-out routines. You’ll see set plays happening.
Dean Rock: Even the Tyrone game in the league, Dublin were still looking to go short a couple of times in the first half. But they got caught because they didn’t really have that range in the kick. Whereas in the second half, Morgan just continued to put the ball down but he was able to drive it through the wind and just got them out that extra 25, 30 yards. It meant that even if Dublin won it, they still had an extra line to get through.
Irish Times: What about the Ulster teams?
Conor McManus: Donegal have the kickers. Of any team, I think they have kickers from outside the arc that can really hurt you. Oisin Gallen can do it, Paddy McBrearty can do it. Michael Murphy can do it. Ciaran Thompson can do it. Michael Langan can do it. Dara Ó Baoill can do it. They’re all lads that are comfortable kicking from 40, 45 metres out. And then you put the running power of Ryan McHugh and Peadar Mogan and these boys in. you have Shaun Patton in goals, defensively they’re quite strong. To me, they’re right up there.
Darragh Ó Sé: Whether it was by design or by chance, when Jim McGuinness came back the kicking from distance was one thing he focused on because of the blanket defence. Now, as it transpires, it’s worked either way with the new rules as well. Go back to the Ulster final last year and you’d a display of kicking from both sides was exceptional.
Dean Rock: Armagh will have their moments. I think they’ll perform well in certain big games and they probably will get a big win or two but I can’t see them winning it. It’s very difficult going back to back.
Darragh Ó Sé: I think Armagh died with their boots on last year. They threw everything into that. You’re not going to get them to replicate that this year. They won games against the head. They won games against Galway and Kerry where they were let off the hook a bit.
Conor McManus: Kerry should have had them beaten. Tom O’Sullivan had two goal chances and got nothing out of them. Shane Ryan comes out and drops one and Armagh get a goal out of it.
Darragh Ó Sé: And then they started diving on balls where our fellows wouldn’t throw themselves in. They had more appetite than we had, they had more drive. I think the rules are going to be one thing. But I think you will find that teams are going to focus just as much – if not more – on how to handle the short season. Teams are definitely going to be cutting their cloth for each game, looking at the opposition and resting players depending on who they’re facing.
Conor McManus: That’s one area where Armagh have an advantage – they have so much depth. There’s so many players of a similar type of standard and a similar type of fitness.
Irish Times: How about Monaghan, Conor?
Conor McManus: I was at most of their games and they were comfortably the best team in Division Two but I would say the standard in Division One compared to Division Two is miles apart. So, Monaghan have done what they needed to do but I definitely wouldn’t be reading a massive amount into it until they play Donegal or Derry in a couple of weeks.
Irish Times: We may as well get predictions, so? Presume we’re all going for Dublin in Leinster?
Darragh, Conor, Dean: Yes.
Irish Times: Munster?
Everyone: Kerry
Irish Times: Connacht?
Darragh Ó Sé: That’s probably more open. I would say Mayo.
Conor McManus: I’d say Mayo too. I don’t think Galway will put a whole pile of currency in winning a Connacht championship this year.
Dean Rock: I’ll go with Galway, just so we’re not all the same.
Irish Times: And Ulster?
Darragh Ó Sé: I fancied Tyrone at the start of the year but they’re a way off it.
Conor McManus: They’re not as far off it as you might think. They got relegated on seven points.
Dean Rock: They’re the only team that finished the league on the up, even though they went down.
Darragh Ó Sé: It’s hard to look beyond Donegal.
Conor McManus: I think Tyrone could have a say in this before the year is out but I’ll go Donegal as well.
Dean Rock: Yeah, Donegal.
Irish Times: And what about the All Ireland?
Conor McManus: I’m going to go with Donegal.
Darragh Ó Sé: I’ll go Kerry.
Dean Rock: I don’t think Dublin will win it anyway. They won’t be too far away but I said Donegal at the start of the year so I’ll stay with that.
Irish Times: We’ll change our minds in a few weeks, no matter what!
