Larry Ryan: Is hurling fixing something that wasn't broken?
NO WAY PAST: Limerick’s Tom Morrisey is tackled by Tipperary’s Jake Morris in last weekend’s Allianz HL Division 1 game at the LIT Gaelic Grounds. A 0-20-0-20 draw was a match played on a tactics board, writes our columnist.
At this time of great global flux, as old convictions are rattled and dunted, we must consider every possibility for a new order.
It’s all up for grabs now. These days we can’t even hear the Sky Sports Premier League song register its certainty that you’ll never stop this flame, without wondering whether, actually, the gathered protestors might be able to give it a good go.
Even the biggest questions must now be on the table. Such as could people go off hurling?
Could a time come where the eulogising stops, the breathless evangelising dries up, the songs of praise die down?
In other words, could hurling ever become like Gaelic football? A flawed game to be cribbed about and meddled with rather than a spiritual calling.
For now, we can surely put last weekend’s rumblings of disappointment with the fare on offer down to temporal displacement.
We ordinarily turn into May having revved through the gears. Been cranked to a championship frenzy via your Co-Op tune-ups and Allianz workouts.
Instead, we ploughed into summer roaring about the famine being over only to face into the pedestrian probings of Only The League.
There was still Ciarán Doyle’s baseball boundary to marvel at, an early renewal of hurling folk’s certificate of authenticity as the chosen people.
And there was a comforting sense of enormous well-being on Leeside as Cork tapped into the 80s nostalgia vibe with a goal flurry befitting Seanie O’Leary and company.
But there was a lot of grousing too.
Some of it was down to gluttony. TJ Ryan gorged himself on three matches the first day back, but went playing golf on the Sunday in a fit of underwhelmedness.
But across the social networks a consensus was building that the lads protesting outside soccer stadiums know the air of: The game’s gone.
Limerick v Tipp was at the heart of the ennui. A match played on a tactics board. A cerebral exercise where theories were tested, systems explored. Liam Sheedy doing a Pep with the false 13, 14, and 15. Timo Werner likelier to produce a goal.
Though the new sin-bin was shown to be a blunt instrument the one time Willie Connors had a sniff and was swiftly hauled down. Had he made it a foot further across the 21, ref Colm Lyons would have been filing Limerick’s punishment in triplicate. Instead, there was no card at all. A law for the naive cynic.
On Dalo’s podcast, TJ and Shane McGrath wrestled with another central contradiction. TJ worrying the game is heading for non-contact, Shane “shuddering on the couch” at some of the hits still going in.
One valid observation leading naturally to the other. Hurling arriving at a logical conclusion — don’t cross the road when a bus is coming.
The tyranny of possession obsession has picked at the stitches of many sports.
Surely Webb-Ellis, when he picked up that ball on account of a poor first touch, never foresaw the day when man-mountains would tuck into barrels of whey in order to ‘go through the phases’.
Gaelic football has arguably never fully recovered from that eureka moment when somebody realised you might be better off not funting it up the field. And every nip and tuck they have compulsively made since will make little odds until they stop them throwing it to each other all day.
Now hurling might be at the cusp of a similar quandary, as the finest minds work the angles and spaces and recycle away from the 50/50 battles, the Hail Marys, the quarter-to-five balls, as they used to call them in the old English First Division.
It will be intriguing to hear how the game’s evolving patterns have affected the soundtrack, when supporters finally come back through the gate. Will some of the Munster Championship frenzy have been sucked away? Will there be spells of studied silence? Will that old hiss of collective inhalation when a lad passes across his own 40 be gone? Will InTheNameOfJaysusLetItIn have been educated out of terrace vocab?
Bearing the brunt of last weekend’s frustration was the new interpretation of the advantage rule, which essentially advises refs to cut to the chase and give a lad a free when he is fouled.
This was the other contradiction during Tipp v Limerick. Everybody complained about the frees being awarded after a player had seemingly ‘broke the tackle’, then Jason Forde potted them from everywhere and anywhere, vindicating the spirit of the supposed bad law. The free, it turns out, was an advantage.
What we seem to be seeing here is a clampdown on the half-foul. An interesting but potentially dangerous experiment which could take us in any direction.
The half-foul is the only thing that has kept Gaelic football any way watchable. If they cut out all the pulling and rooting, lads could handpass merrily up and down the field ‘til the cows came home and weren’t milked for a week.
When we think too of the greatest hurling exhibitions — Tipp v Kilkenny ‘09 for instance — we picture a healthy tolerance for the half-foul, and sometimes the full-foul, contributing handsomely to the spectacle.
And yet there is a parallel urge to rid hurling of its messy ills, its use of the ‘spare hand’ and other shades of grey when it comes to baulking the man with the ball.
We might be about to sacrifice one summer to a behavioural experiment. If players realise half-fouls are being punished with frees and points, might they — lo and behold — stop fouling?
And where would that lead us? Without the spare hand’s involvement, would hurlers need to bench press quite as much in order to ‘break tackles’? And if hurlers weren’t quite as strong, might there be less need to plot elaborate routes around the ‘collision zones’?
Alternatively, we might now be set for a compulsive series of nips and tucks. As a game tries to fix something that wasn’t really broken.
