The week of the All-Ireland final is strange in that you have two teams working round the clock to make sure every detail is accounted for, while every other county in Ireland is already thinking about the 2019 season. But the implications of the outcome of the coaching we will see at play in Sunday’s final and, by extension, the All-Ireland winning template, can’t be overstated.
The video analysis carried out by all serious county – and club – teams now is microscopic. The recordings of next Sunday’s game will be worn out by analysts keen to absorb every pattern of play and defensive set-up to bring to their own dressing room. Coaches will conclude that the winning team, be it Dublin or Tyrone, have hit upon a winning template and will bring elements of that into their coaching. So if heavy defensive caution, short kick-outs, a proliferation of hand passing and backwards passing defines the All-Ireland final, coaches will figure that this is the way to go.
There has been much angst about the state of football this summer. The game has been repeatedly held up for unfavourable comparison to hurling. And it is true that hurling has been a breathtaking spectacle, underpinned by energy and intensity and a crazy number of hits. This was reflected in the demand for tickets: never in my life have I had so many calls about hurling tickets for an All-Ireland final. So the hurling fraternity have created something very special. And the football community is in near-despair that their game seems to contain almost none of these magical ingredients anymore.
But why? For me, the answer is obvious. Hurling is almost entirely played on the transition. Twenty years ago, if you take the hurls away, there wasn’t all that much difference between hurling and football. Structurally, they were the same. Now, both games feel and look very different.
Cautious tactics
There is a loud school of thought out there insisting that the problem lies with contemporary football coaches who are dragging the game towards some nightmare version of its former self with hugely negative and cautious tactics. But that’s a fearful way of looking at the game – and the world. The truth is that coaching innovation has found a way of legally stretching and even exploiting the rules of Gaelic football, which are suited to the game as it was played 25 years ago – but not as it is played today.
The way to change and improve Gaelic football is simple and it can be achieved by its custodians with the stroke of a pen. You simply change the rules to reintroduce the best qualities of the sport. Counties have recently been asked to submit proposals for amendments to Gaelic football. The perceived problems will come under the spotlight. The potential for change here is enormous and exciting but I think it is important that the consequences of each rule change are thoroughly examined before they are implemented.
There is a lot of talk about the influence of basketball on Gaelic football at the moment. Some of it is valid; much of it is nonsense. Basketball, like hurling at the moment, has this high-octane, relentless style. Like hurling, it is played predominantly on the transition. A buzz term in Gaelic football, “pushing up on the kick-out”, that is a decades-old strategy in basketball in terms of the full-court press. All coaching should be about learning from other sports, and the high press has become common currency in both soccer and Gaelic football.
What if a score from play (only) from outside the 45 was worth two points? What impact would this have on long-range point-taking?
During my time at Celtic, I stood in many dressing rooms when a coach said: “Will someone just put their foot on the ball and make a few passes. It’s like a game of basketball out there!” What they meant was that the game was too unpredictable, free and up-and-down for their liking. And that worried them because a goal is such a huge concession in a game of soccer. The same has become true in Gaelic football. You hear pundits now say that the game is “gone like basketball”. In a sense, they couldn’t be more wrong. Because possession has become so important in Gaelic football, that end-to-end spontaneity is in danger of disappearing altogether.
Bugbear
The proliferation of the hand pass has become a bugbear for many. But rather than just give out about the hand pass, surely it is worth asking why teams have become so dependent on it. My own county, Donegal, has always been labelled as having a hand-passing tradition. There is a theory that pitches along the coast, exposed to Atlantic winds, brought a natural emphasis on the short, reliable pass. I remember as a young player playing games on small pitches with an emphasis on keep-ball; you didn’t give it away or else you heard about it.
Kerry's Jack O'Connor was, for me, one of the first coaches to use the hand-pass to get his team up the field as fast as possible with minimum risk until they could deliver ball to the inside forwards. I would suggest that Jim Gavin has extended this, using the hand pass as a strategy on which a possession-based approach is built. And I can see why he does this: to keep control of the game and to demoralise the opposition. But Kerry's was a tactic, whereas Dublin's is integral to their game plan. However, the reality in the game now is that the hand pass to the inside line has replaced the kick pass to the inside line.
The second issue is the trend towards attacking, not being happy with the options in front and then passing the ball backwards. It is attractive to coaches because it offers zero-risk ball retention and also looks to draw the opposition out. The obvious example was the last 15 minutes of the Dublin-Donegal game in the Super 8 series. The conclusion of that game felt to me like we had reached a new reality in how the game could be played. If you look at all the pretenders to the crown, they are looking to employ this strategy now. You will see Tyrone doing this – if they can – on Sunday: looking to take the sting out of the game with long passages of play and waiting for the right moment to attack.
Go back to hurling for a moment. What is happening when a team gets the ball? So much is in the moment and spontaneous and, a lot of the time, the players don’t know what is going to happen next as they attack. The opposite is true in Gaelic football. The stakes in possession are high. I remember being at the Tyrone-Donegal game and it felt as if no player wanted to initiate an attack unless he knew what the likely outcome would be. None of this is wrong. Again, coaches are challenging the rules and patterns with innovative tactics based on the primary aim of trying to win the game. I feel the shift from 2014, when I last coached at inter-county level, to now has been enormous. This is what coaching is. So if all these changes are happening, then it makes sense that the game adapts and changes are introduced in order to liberate the ways in which the game is played.
Controlled
The reality is that it has become very controlled. If hurling is about beautiful unpredictability, then Gaelic football has become about absolute predictability and control. So for me, if there are to be rule changes, then administrators should have this quality of unpredictability at the forefront of their minds. How can we make the game faster? How can we make it more intense and bring back that championship edge?
It is important not to be afraid of where the game is going. I think Gaelic football could be revolutionised for the better with a few elemental rule changes. One of the primary rules of basketball is the back-court violation. The playing area on a basketball court is quite tight to begin with but even so, once a team crosses the halfway line into the opponent’s half of the court, they cannot bring the ball back into their own half again.
What if this was introduced to Gaelic football – but with the line of no return being the opponent’s 65? And what if you introduced a further rule decreeing that all teams must have at least four players in the offensive half of the pitch at all times? In other words, a team can only defend with a maximum of 11 players – 10 plus the goalkeeper. Straight away, the spectre of the 15-man blanket is removed forever from the coaching artillery. And, once the offensive team commits to bringing the ball beyond the offensive 65, then they have no option but to try to use it constructively and sharply because the safety net of recycling it has been removed.
Players and coaches would adapt to that with lightning results. Furthermore, what are the implications of those four offensive players? It means that a team has a platform on which to get their transition game going; to be able to lift their head and kick the ball ahead to those link players – something that is missing from the game at the moment. I don’t see how that would fail.
The issue of hand-passing is more complex. The automatic response is to limit the number of consecutive passes. But what would the number be? And if you are facing a defence of 11, who will you kick it to? And how? With spaces being squeezed, players scarcely have time to get the hand pass away, let alone the kick pass. But if the above rules were introduced, would it not lead to a reduction of passing anyway? If teams don’t have players up the field, they are forced to run the ball through the hand. The current structure forces a team into possession football. The above rule changes would, throughout the enforced layout of the teams, facilitate speed and transition – like hurling.
Unique aspects
There are many other adjustments, minor and major, that could be made to help the game to evolve and also to restore its unique aspects. Where is the hard, fair shoulder gone? It was an integral part of the game: the big shoulder hit between a McGilligan and a Molloy in Clones or a thundering hit in a Cork-Kerry derby. That physicality has been diluted in football. There are too many frees and petty decisions that kill the momentum. And I think the officials can play a role in allowing a return of that fair, physical combat which would allow the game to flow.
The idea of imposing a rule that all kick-outs should cross the 45 is, I feel, a limitation rather than a development
What about scoring?
When basketball’s administrators wanted to emphasise distance-shooting, they brought in the three-point line. It transformed the game. Why can’t Gaelic football do this? What if a score from play (only) from outside the 45 was worth two points? What impact would this have on long-range point-taking, which has, historically, been one of the more beautiful aspects of the game? Imagine the excitement that would bring in the closing minutes of tight games. Plus, it would have the added dimension of forcing defensive blocks further out the field – which would in turn give the team in possession more opportunity to breach that cover with a high-octane running game. How could that fail?
Let's make the template for what we want the game to be. It is about taking the best of the game and applying rules to facilitate those qualities
The idea of imposing a rule that all kick-outs should cross the 45 is, I feel, a limitation rather than a development. The introduction of the mark has helped the game enormously in terms of the return of an occasionally brilliant piece of high fielding. But its real consequence was unintended: it has caused the quality of kick-outs – short, medium and long – to go through the roof. Stephen Cluxton and Rory Beggan are the obvious masters. But Niall Morgan, Shaun Patton and Mark Donnellan really impressed me at the games I attended this summer. Jump back 25 years and a good kick out was when a goalkeeper could get a bit of flight on the ball so his midfielder could time his run. Now these guys can tread the needle with any range of kick-out. I don't see how that is a bad thing.
Variables
Let’s make the template for what we want the game to be. It is about taking the best of the game and applying rules to facilitate those qualities. Create variables that allow the game to flow. That is the big thing that games like hurling and basketball have: a natural flow.
The game is changing rapidly. Change is the only certainty in life. The changes here need to add value. They can't be born out of fear. The knock-on of effect of rule changes must be thoroughly examined. For instance, people probably didn't think about the impact of the mark on the propensity for short and medium kick-outs. But that is what has happened. So there are all kinds of hidden consequences. If they brought in the mark all over the field – which has been touted – how would that impact on player development? Obviously, it would place a premium on high fielding. So what kind of player would managers begin to seek in an inside forward in five years' time? I would imagine a big 6ft 4in inside forward who can catch a ball and earn his team a point. Well, fine. But where, then, is the room then for the inventive guile of Colm Cooper or Peter Canavan?
Coaches will always squeeze as much as they can from the game. In Gaelic football, it is obvious that the tactical innovations have outstripped the prevailing laws of the game. The game has shifted and that has to be reflected in the contemporary rules. I feel that those who are always crying about the state of the game don’t have sufficient faith or belief in the potential of the sport to change and adapt and thrive again and, crucially, to recover its relentlessness. It is the nature – and duty – - of coaching to challenge the orthodox. And it is the obligation of those who oversee the game to respond in kind.
