Kick the ‘Orangeball’ into play
A Champions League format would be “airy-fairy stuff” that would “politically have no chance of being successful”.
Instead any change they’ll be advocating will be on how the game itself is played.
McGee and his colleagues are probably right to adopt this tactic. It’s not that football’s competitive structures are fine as they are, and judging by the proposals on the clár of Friday’s GPA AGM, a good number of the players’ body favour reform as well.
The current format is unfair on players and teams in so many ways. Take Cork and Kerry in the 2013 championship. People will say it’s not right that both teams are essentially into the last 12 of next year’s All-Ireland series. But this column believes the format is unfair on Cork and Kerry.
Eamonn Fitzmaurice and Conor Counihan have each assembled formidable backroom teams. The general public will have little idea of the plotting and plodding those men will undertake over the next nine months ahead of what promises to be a titanic, even tectonic, clash in Killarney.
There will be countless phonecalls and meetings, fitness and skills programmes to be drawn up and implemented, multiple Sundays donning woolly halls observing and enduring McGrath Cup and Allianz League games.
Then one of them will win that showdown in July and one of them will lose, by no more than a kick of a ball.
That loser should still invariably make it to the last eight. But then they and the Munster champions will most likely face another serious contender that has prepared similarly well: a Donegal, Dublin, Mayo. And one of those heavyweights will lose, maybe by just a point due to a poor referee’s decision.
They might have won the league, they might lose to the eventual All-Ireland champions by just a point, but their season will be over after just a couple of legitimate tests all summer.
It’s the same for teams further down the ladder. They’re investing too much financially and emotionally without being ensured more championship games for a better measure of their progress and season.
But, as McGee has concluded, that argument is for another day, or at least another task group. Any radical change to the structure of the football championship was going to have an obvious knock-on effect on the club scene and hurling as well. It could never have been done in isolation but only in conjunction with an all-seeing and all-powerful master fixtures workgroup. That should be Liam O’Neill’s next big baby.
McGee was also on the 1999 Football Development Committee who became so preoccupied with proposing (too) bold championship format reform that they didn’t sufficiently deal with how the game itself was changing. This latest football workgroup is now doing the inverse of that.
They have been inundated with suggestions from all quarters. We’re wary of a cumulative yellow-card system. Often someone will be booked for very little only his marker was at him and the ref didn’t see it, so just to cover himself and to ensure there’s no more carry-on, the referee flashes yellow at them both. A good, honest corner back is bound to pick up a yellow card every couple of games for committing a second or third foul within an hour.
While sin bin has some merit we found in both the 2005 and 2009 leagues, players who committed what were barely yellow-card offences were incurring the same wrath as players who were committing fouls that were closer to red cards.
There is a middle ground between yellow and red that the card system has yet to address. We’d favour the introduction of an orange card and what we call an “orangeball”.
Whenever someone commits what Liam O’Neill’s 2009 workgroup termed a “highly-disruptive foul,” don’t just flash them an orange card (which would mean a further tick, let alone a yellow card, and that player is sent off). Move the ball to a spot about 25 metres out from the offender’s goal, allowing the opposition a very scoreable free-in. Then after that attempt at the posts, play resumes from where the original foul was committed. That could well result in two scoreable frees back-to-back. So be it.
It would work. While referees are loath to order someone off the field, they’ll be less hesitant in seeing that player’s team give up another score on the scoreboard.
It would also tackle an ever-increasing trend in football. Donegal have brought a lot of welcome innovations to football in recent years but it’s gone without comment or censure that they’re regularly late back onto the field for the second half. In basketball that would result in a technical foul and two free-throws for the opposing team. In football there is no such deterrent but if Jimmy and his charges knew they’d be conceding an orangeball 25-metre free-in every time they weren’t back onto that field within the allotted 15 minutes, they’d become a lot less tardy.
Think about the orangeball, Eugene. Football itself would reap the fruits of it.
