Tackling properly the key to winning
For those who didn’t trawl through the transcripts from the GAA talkathon up in Derry, this is a recurring discussion which centres on the reward for high fielding in Australian Rules – when a player makes a clean catch (once the ball’s travelled ten yards) he’s allowed to choose whether to carry on playing or take a free-kick, in effect.
The attraction of such a rule in Gaelic football would be that you’d eradicate the swarming and crowding of players who make a high catch by opponents; at present if a player makes a clean catch in the middle of the field it’s almost counterproductive because as soon as he lands he’s surrounded by opposing players who bottle him up.
The mark is a highlight in the Australian game, an integral part of it. The problem with bringing it into Gaelic football is not that it’s something from another sport, though. It’s that the decision privileges one skill over another.
During the week Joe Brolly tweeted pictures of high fielding, and there’s no doubt it’s attractive, a terrific exhibition of athleticism and timing.
But tackling properly is a skill as well. It doesn’t look as spectacular as high fielding; it doesn’t feature in as many iconic GAA images; and compared to someone soaring over his marker and pulling a ball down out of the sky, it’s often hard to see from row Z of the stand.
However, tackling properly is the key to winning. For instance, your columnist recently chatted to the same Joe Brolly, who pointed out that turnovers are the key to success in Gaelic football – the team which can turn the ball over, or tackle properly, generally wins.
The problem is that we don’t place enough value on tackling properly either technically or aesthetically, though the two are related: we feel that mobbing a player who’s gone into the sky for the ball is somehow against the spirit of the game, that we should have a more gentlemanly one-on-one encounter when the skywalker comes back to the ground.
Something that’s often forgotten in talking about the mark, significantly enough, is that in Australian Rules there’s no issue with tackling because of the mark itself, first of all, and because there’s a culture of moving the ball before going into contact anyway.
Nobody seems willing to acknowledge that the speed at which Aussie Rules is played isn’t just down to the mark; it’s down to the way the game has embraced the tackle.
