Culture generally refers to acts or manifestations of intellectual creativity or at times the attitudes, customs or behaviour of a specific society or ethnic group.

There is however a drift towards it being used to describe trends or tendencies and especially unwelcome ones. Thus for example, what might simply be categorised as white-collar crime can become “the culture of non-compliance in the financial sector”.

Closer to home, the “culture” of indiscipline and cynical play might more accurately be described as the indulgence of bad habits, which as we know are either dealt with through the exercise of self-discipline if it’s your own idea to address them or if it’s someone else’s, punishment and deterrents.

The progress of the football league to date has been so in keeping with the intentions of the Football Review Committee’s (FRC) first report that, had they been given an opportunity to script it, they could hardly have come up with a more ringing endorsement of their prescriptions.

At this stage, more than half way through the regulation season, it might be too early to identify beyond doubt where football is going in the longer term but at the moment the increased penalties for cynical play and calculated fouling have had the desired effect.

Increased scoring
Attractive though the competing explanation of the increased scoring totals – that counties are also copying All-Ireland champions Dublin's emphasis on offence – may be it's not the principal reason why the scoring statistics are changing.

And they are undoubtedly changing. At this point of the season, the scoring total for the four divisions stands at 144-1634 – 2066 points – as opposed to last year’s comparable totals of 117-1417 (1768 points). Over the same number of matches, that’s a stark increase of 4.65 points a match.

There is some validity in the idea that whatever style is proving effective will have a certain allure for other counties but how many managers uniformly adopt such tactics regardless of the playing strengths at their disposal?

Tyrone have been the most touted of the examples but even though he floats the above theory convincingly, Mickey Harte is the last manager in the country who's going to be swept away by prevailing fashions in football. The county's approach may however have something to do with the supply of exceptionally talented forwards in Tyrone and it remains to be seen whether the flagged reservations about the approach – the difficulty of defending with an un-supplemented back six – will bring about a tactical review before the summer.

Successful systems are never that easily copied. The lack of talented footballers of the same size as Kieran Donaghy meant that the 2006 reinvention of the target-man full forward was not going to be a widespread phenomenon and eventually that became obvious even to those coaches trying to turn around their fortunes by placing the tallest man in the county on the edge of the square.

The stamina, adaptability and technical skill required to play Tyrone’s swarm defence and total football similarly meant that teams lacking those qualities simply weren’t able to sustain the constant demands to inter-change positions and consequently disintegrated under the strain – capable of packing a defence but not of breaking out and taking chances at the other end.

It’s more plausible that the new disciplinary dispensation has been the more radical influence on the increased scoring. When fouling of the type proscribed becomes more of a liability than an asset, behaviour has to be reconsidered. In spite of all the dire warnings about how managers would deploy players to take a black card for the team, there is both an absence of evidence that anyone considers this a worthwhile tactic as well as abundant indications that players don’t particularly want to be forcibly replaced and lose their place on a team.

Deterrents work. When the fore-runner of the black card sanction – the mandatory replacement of a player for committing certain fouls – was trialled in 2009, there was a similar impact on indiscipline.

Disciplinary initiative
That year's football league produced a higher scoring total than 2008 but, unlike this season, it was a modest rise of around a point per match (27.45 compared to 26.63).

It’s likely that this weaker impact owed something to the conviction amongst teams and managers that because the disciplinary initiative was just a trial, there was no need to buy into a whole new dispensation.

By putting their accepted recommendations straight into rule, the FRC made sure that there would be no escape for those inclined to make deliberate rule breaking part of their tactics.

In the weekend's Sunday Times Christy O'Connor surveyed the impact of the black card and interviewed amongst others Cork forward John Hayes, who has been restored to the county panel after a couple of years out. His comments on the league so far were telling.

“The biggest change I noticed since coming back is the body check has been cut out. That really frustrated players but it was a tactic and a lot of teams were coaching it. The fact that a trip or a drag-down is also a black card means that you can go at defenders and take them on more. You can just approach the game differently now.”

So it mightn’t be quite a cultural revolution but it’s a big improvement.

smoran@irishtimes.com