Kieran Shannon: Don’t blame players or coaches for ‘boring’ Gaelic football. Blame the rules
Dublin's Robbie McDaid with Diarmuid O’Connor of Mayo during the 2020 All-Ireland Hurling final. Picture: INPHO/Tommy Dickson
If it’s any consolation to Gaelic football, it’s not the only sport that has had people pondering how it is that while its players have never been better, the game itself probably is not.
In the past month as Dinny Allen, Kevin McStay, and Pat Spillane publicly expressed their concern with how the sport they once played is trending, several observers have been wondering something similar about Stateside sports, summarised in a podcast over the weekend by The Ringer’s Chris Ryan entitled: What’s wrong with the NBA?
While Ryan quickly qualified that such a title was deliberately provocative and exaggerated to garner our attention, he maintained that for all the huge scoring tallies being racked up by teams and the brilliance of individual players in the face of a crowdless, condensed, and Covid-ravaged season, there was “something slightly off with the game”.
Technology was possibly making the game worse than better. The final four minutes of games were overly-protracted and stop-start with so many video reviews to go with multiple timeouts and free throws. And with teams having calculated that it is significantly more efficient to take a three-pointer than a long-range or even mid-range two-pointer, the deluge of attempts from beyond the arc had fundamentally distorted the game that he grew up watching and falling in love with.
He had a similar sentiment about baseball. “You could have a cool situation and all of a sudden all of the in-fielders are on the one side of the field, so the likelihood is that’s not going to work for the hitter and there’s not going to be these interesting base-running situations. There’s just going to be a less creative product on the field.”
Ryan didn’t extend his thesis to Gaelic Games but Allen, McStay, and Spillane have essentially done it for him. Again you’ve too many players on the one side of the field, leading to an increasingly homogenous feel to the sport and a less creative product on the field.
Allen lately told Michael Moynihan of this parish that outside of a game involving his native Cork or an All-Ireland series match featuring Dublin or Kerry, he now barely watches the sport.
“The way the game is played now, most teams play the percentages. They hold onto the ball, play it back and forward across the field, and eventually one of the opposition defenders will slip or make a mistake, or lose their position, and the team in possession can get through for a point.
“And this is probably where I’m disappearing, because I can’t handle that stuff. It’s completely boring to me.”
Spillane, speaking on last week’s RTÉ GAA podcast with Brendan Cummins, was likewise turned off by the emphasis on retaining possession. To strengthen his case, he compared it to the unpredictability of the 1986 All-Ireland final he happened to come across while channel-hopping lately. It wasn’t so much the brilliance of his own game-changing goal that struck him but the game’s “unpredictability and 50-50 challenges”; for all the “Haily-Mary kicking” and “pot shots”, it was an “exciting, rollercoaster of a game” compared to more recent fare.
The past month has seen another, more forensic comparison between an All-Ireland featuring Spillane and one involving the current Dublin side. The analyst Diarmuid Whelan, in conjunction with Deely Sport Science, found that while there were 123 turnovers in the 1981 Kerry-Offaly final, there was just 36 when Dublin beat Mayo last December. While almost one in two possessions ended with a score in 2020 (45%), in 1981 it wasn’t even one in seven (13%). The sport was unrecognisable.
In contrasting both those finals, McStay, like Allen and Spillane, stressed how players and teams are across the board far more skilful, fitter, and tactically-aware now. “You wouldn’t have had much business playing in the 2020 final if you hadn’t mastered the skills of the game,” said McStay. “But you could have played in the ’89 [or ’81] final.” And yet, McStay surmised, “The older game was more exciting. It just was.”
We could pull McStay up by saying the 2020 final was significantly superior to its 1981 counterpart as the respective scorelines – Dublin 2-14 Mayo 0-16; Kerry 1-12 Offaly 0-8 — suggest, and that if you were to take All-Ireland semi-finals as a gauge of the health of the game, then it was far better from 2005 to 2017 than it was the previous 30 years. But Allen, Spillane, and McStay are on to something. The game isn’t as good or as exciting as it should be.
Spillane had a thesis why — and a group of people to blame. While he wasn’t being “a caveman” and understood the value of sports science support, the obsession with stats had led to the obsession with retaining possession.
This though is where he departs from McStay — and the aforementioned Ryan from The Ringer who not only asked What’s Wrong with the NBA? but also Who Should Fix It? In answering it, he cited some recent comments by a Ben Faugh, a former analytics lead with the Philadelphia 76ers and Portland Trailblazers.
“The analysis movement gets a lot of blame for changes to sports that fans don’t like but there is nothing that analytics does to make the product worse beyond accelerate what coaches and players were already doing: compete to the best of their ability within the rules. ‘Within the rules’ being key.
“Game play may change in a negative way as a result of statistical analysis but that’s not the fault of the analysis. It’s the fault of the rules. The fix? Change the rules.”
The same applies on this side of the Atlantic, something which McStay for one recognised. The fault is not in the analytics or analysts but in the rules.
As McStay pointed out, back when he and Allen and Spillane were playing, there were no tactics; you could even say that all 20th-century football could be called The Pre-Tactical Era. Or, as Liam Hayes bluntly put it, before the advent of McGuinness’s Donegal, or at least Armagh in the early 2000s, football teams weren’t particularly smart. But that’s changed.
Probably the most recognisable face of the NBA’s analytics movement, Daryl Morey, said at last month’s Sloan Conference that as front offices get smarter, it’s going to put more pressure on the [NBA] league office to be intentional about their rule changes. Until the administrators legislate against the game getting out of whack, teams are going to exploit inefficiencies.
The same holds true here. Although Dave Hassan’s playing rules committee made some shrewd tweaks in their tenure, Croke Park has not kept up with teams’ exploiting those inefficiencies.
It’s something McStay noted. “I think the responsibility now lies with the legislators. How can you come up with a game that returns it to being predominately a spectacle? Do we go to 13-a-side? Do the rules change? Do we go four points for a goal?” He was just getting the ball rolling. There are other things that deserve consideration, including some things from Morey’s sport, like a shot-clock or a back-court violation. Or maybe you have to have so many players in the opposition half of the field.
When Jason Sherlock was asked a few months after the 2017 All-Ireland final about the unseemly end to that game when his forwards deliberately hauled down Mayo players, he just noted they exploited a gap in the rule. Now that he’s no longer in a GAA front office, he is the kind of brain that the GAA’s front office should be seeking out, along with a McStay or Kevin Walsh, all interestingly who come from a basketball background that has informed their excellent coaching.
Either way when football resumes next month and there are times, like Allen, when we’ll get frustrated with the ball going side-to-side across the field, don’t blame the players or coaches or even the faceless analytics. Blame and then fix the rules.
