Like most of the football community, Paul Earley is enthusiastic about the impact of the FRC rules on this summer’s championship, but is also concerned about the apparent inability to curb the preponderance of hand passing.
As a member of the previous 2012 Football Review Committee (FRC) and a highly qualified coach, Earley’s thoughts on the direction of the game have been regularly carried in these pages.
Previous tweaks that he advocated and supported included getting rid of both the 12v11 goalkeeper overload and the mitigation of red and black cards by exempting the punished team from the “three up” requirement.
He continues to oppose the two-point free, believing the two-pointers should be kicked only from play.
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A north star for him, though, has been the need for the game to rebalance in terms of creating contests for the ball, which is undermined by long bouts of possession football.
The FRC deliberately stayed away from the handpass at first but looked at restrictions in the recent trials, without endorsing them.
The original thinking or hope was that with the three-up rule, quick-transfer kick passing would prove more effective, but after a stable start to the season in the league when the hand-to-kick pass ratio held steady at about the 2024 mark of 3.4, the differential has steadily increased to 4.4.
“That hasn’t worked out as well for them,” says Earley. “You had things like that period before half-time in the All-Ireland final where a lot of hand-passing was going on. You could pose a counterargument that that was a tactical decision by the Donegal team to sit back and give Kerry the latitude to do that.
“Other teams may have just pushed out aggressively and contested possession, so you could argue that, and also that their lack of ambition was punished by the David Clifford two-pointer.”
At present, whereas data from the invaluable Games Intelligence Unit (GIU) shows that the 40m kick-out has undoubtedly increased centrefield contests, the overall rate of turnovers is consistently less than last year’s 41 per cent.
That is the kernel of the FRC dilemma. You can’t force teams to compete for the ball if they have a defensive preference. For Earley, the radical solution can be gleaned from his past as the first modern footballer to be recruited by the AFL, as well as his stint as Ireland international rules manager.
Although at pains to emphasise that the FRC project is still in its infancy, he believes further intervention may be needed to get a grip on this issue.
“There are three things that I think are fundamental reasons why there are so many handpasses in the game now.
“Primarily it’s because it’s becoming more difficult to dispossess the player. I’ve said for a long time that I’m not sure if the current tackle is fit for purpose any more in the modern game. There’s no doubt that players are better conditioned, better skilled, stronger, faster, fitter than previous generations.
“The tackle, where you can only tackle the ball on a one-to-one basis, is very difficult. That’s why we rarely see dispossessions on a one-on-one. We generally see the dispossessions where there’s a group tackling, two or three people tackling a player.
“That encourages zonal marking as opposed to the one-to-one defending, because it’s more difficult to dispossess with the tackle that’s defined as it is at the moment. That’s one aspect of it. I’m sure the Football Review Committee would have looked at the tackle.
“But it is probably the most difficult one to deal with, to alter. Do you make it a more robust tackle which probably would help to alleviate that problem and would give defenders or opposition a better opportunity to dispossess? But what does that look like? That, therein, lies the challenge in terms of changing the tackle.”
[ GAA referees signal approval for Football Review Committee rule changesOpens in new window ]
A more physical tackle would be a radical reshaping of the game. Its “cultural” impact could be seen in international rules matches when Irish players got caught in possession, because there was no scope to idle on the ball and weigh up options. Like in rugby, it was a matter of “use it or lose it”.
“But they got the hang of it, and I remember Michael Murphy and Seán Cavanagh [Ireland captains in 2014 and 2008] would have said, ‘Look, there’s absolute clarity in this, which is great’.
“It probably changes the fundamental nature of the game. Maybe, if you were to introduce a tackle where, let’s say if you hold a player with your two arms, they have to release the ball. But we need something more robust than it is at the moment.
“Two, I saw in that having considered the backcourt rule [no passing back into a team’s own half once they have transitioned into attack], they appear to have decided against it, which is a pity.
“What that would inevitably have done is, if a team carried the ball out – we used the Kerry example in the final in that three-minute period before half-time – that encourages the opposition to come out, because they know they are operating in a smaller space. The ball cannot be moved back to a spare defender.
“Three, we should eliminate the open-hand pass. It’s too easy, and the rule should be that you must only fist pass the ball. I felt this for a while. The open hand makes it very easy just to slip a ball off and easier to disguise the throws. And get rid of the handpass score.”
Special congress will debate the permanent adoption of the FRC rule changes on October 4th.
