Three ways to make football a better game
Seriously. He says he’d like “only” three rule changes to Gaelic football.
One of them would be to impose the Australian Rules tackle on our game, a rule change that would so fundamentally change the game we’d be as well off calling it Gaelic Rules.
It seems to have escaped Seán that the tackle he’d love to see in Gaelic was the same tackle that drove his own county man Colm Cooper into doing a Stephen Ireland of sorts and quitting international football at 22.
By rewarding brute force ahead of finesse, it would greatly decrease the odds of another Cooper even coming into the game, let alone staying in it.
There is a lot of ambiguity, confusion and frustration surrounding the tackle in Gaelic football but then there is a lot of ambiguity and confusion in most sports concerning what constitutes a foul or not. Do you honestly think even 10% of a crowd or audience watching a big rugby match these days know what a fraction of the penalties are awarded for? Bressie — yeah, we hadn’t heard of him before either up until a couple of months ago — was an international underage rugby player and a keen Gaelic footballer before he became a musician and a talent show judge and he has admitted he didn’t know what half the penalties in rugby were called for. But because rugby is an international sport — albeit a small one by international standards — it has that air of sophistication which means that the same Johnny in your local that will shout in exasperation that there’s “no bloody tackle in football!” will passively accept what random interpretation of the breakdown a rugby official will make. We could write a whole column about tackling in Gaelic football but that is not this column. Our column is to again credit Walsh, genuinely. Because in his report to Munster Council convention, he reminded us that there is a rules advisory committee in place and suggested a couple of rules that would improve the game. The clean lift off the ground would speed up the game enormously. And as Walsh correctly points out, the mark from a kick out does reward the high fielder when right now he’s being punished and bottled up.
Here’s some other changes that would make the game much fairer and flow better and quicker.
1. Any deliberately cynical foul automatically results in a 20-metre free in. We see it every game now. A wing-back or wing-forward is bombing upfield. If he breaks this tackle he’s eating up another 20 yards and a score is opening up. Instead, he’s cynically hauled down. The challenge is closer to a red card offence than a yellow card offence — that grey area which in previous leagues constituted a sin bin or a yellow-card dismissal — but it’s not quite a red card either so the culprit remains on the field while the attacking side only have a free out on the wing, still outside the scoring zone, instead of the area they were about to penetrate. Why in football should a free only be taken from where the foul was committed? Because that’s how it is in soccer? In basketball, such fouls automatically lead to the ball being brought up to the free-throw line and the attacking side get two free throws. Football would benefit from a similar penalty. It would also be an appropriate penalty for any team that is late coming out for the second half.
2. If you go down injured after your side has conceded a score you have to be automatically replaced. Feigning injury to break an opponent’s momentum is now rampant and it is a form of institutionalised cheating that any rules body must challenge if the GAA purports to be a body that promotes fair play.
3. If a team commits a technical foul — or, to use a saying of our fathers, fouls the ball — it only results in an indirect free in or a free from the sideline.
This column and others have pointed out that Kevin McMenamin double-hopped the ball on the 45-metre line in last year’s All-Ireland final and got away with it, but wouldn’t a Bryan Sheehan free in have been too severe a punishment when, as we’ve mentioned, cynical fouls on the wing go relatively unpunished? At any moment referees could decide to pull defenders up for illegal hand-passing, leading to an automatic point to the opposition.
In rugby, if you knock the ball forward, it is only a put in at the scrum, not an automatic three points for the opposition; in basketball, the ball taken in from the side rather than free throws. If you were to score from out there in football, fair enough, let the score stand, but a free in is too severe a penalty at the moment. There’s been a lot of talk about the value of the Sigerson Cup in the wider scheme of things but the college game would be the ideal place to try out these experiments and in doing so serve the whole game well.
After all, college is supposed to be where you experiment with things.
* kieranshannon@eircom.net
