Football isn’t dead but it’s poorly
Monaghan’s Dick Clerkin was probably the most prominent figure to pull Burns up. ‘Would have thought your new position commands a bit more restraint, pragmatism and perspective, Jarlath.’
The new position he was referring to was Burns’ appointment as chairman of the standing committee on playing rules by new GAA president Aogan O’Fearghail.
True enough, Burns’ choice of language was overly-catastrophic. Football is not dead.
But it’s not near as healthy as it should be. It’s like those candidates on a certain TV show. It requires an Operation Transformation. And after years of ignorance and apathy from the association’s lawmakers, it was encouraging to see someone with enough knowledge, passion and now authority indicate enough was enough.
There was further criticism for Burns. You might be familiar with the arguments of these All-Knowing Contrarians. Are we implying there’s no skill in defending? These ultra-defensive systems are “fascinating”. If you’re smart or skilful enough, you’ll break them down; if you’re not, you’ll lose and rightly so, tough.
To this column, such rhetoric is grandstanding, implying that they hold a deeper and higher knowledge of the game from not just the likes of Burns but Jim Gavin, a coach who has won three of the last four national titles on offer.
Of course there’s tremendous skill in defending, especially of the one-to-one variety — so why not want more of it? As Burns observed earlier last week, “[People] want to see great blocks and tackles from defenders. But they don’t want to see 12 men consistently behind a ball. That’s lazy coaching.”
There might have been something bold and original about Jim McGuinness’s vision and tactics in 2011-12. Now it’s not new. It’s becoming the norm. When a side encounters an extreme mass defence it’s now less a test of wits as a test of dares. A game of chicken.
“Come out and try to score against us here!”
“No, you first.”
“No, you. Dare ya!”
“Ha! Dare you! Chicken! Pluck, pluck....”
Even Kerry weren’t prepared to blink first in last year’s All-Ireland stareoff and leave themselves open to the counterattack. The Contrarians say skill and game intelligence will break down the double-stitched blanket. Everyone else has just looked at last year’s All-Ireland final. Kerry are one of the two most technically-skilful teams in the country. They are the best decision-makers and smartest footballers in the country. They calculated the best way to win the All-Ireland wasn’t to try and feed James O’Donoghue for five points from play in that game. Instead they used him as a foil, a pawn instead of the jewel he is.
It’s easy to say like they do in basketball ‘Well, if you’re surrounded by three defenders, it must mean two attackers are free.’ In basketball you can jump up and throw the ball over your head to one of those free men. In football you can’t throw the ball, let alone over your head.
We hear ‘Switch the play by foot’. But often by the time the ball lands three defenders have surrounded the receiver.
Sure the blanket requires high levels of fitness — occupying further time that could be devoted to skills. It requires some subtle systematic fouling to allow time for bodies to file back — further corroding the spirit of the game and those who play and coach it.
The blanket isn’t so much saying ‘If you’re skilful enough, you’ll still win.’ It’s saying, ‘You’ll have to be 10 points more skilful than us to win this by three.’
The defensive team haven’t strived to improve their own shooting or footpassing; they’re merely putting the onus on you to show yours is better.
The world’s two biggest sports have been here before. Association football multiple times in its history has tweaked the offside rule. The dismal 1990 World Cup prompted the abolition of the goalkeepers being allowed to handle a back pass.
For basketball a turning point came in 1954. Up to then the sport had no shot clock. It left the sport open to abuse from a plethora of nihilistic McGuinness-types. In 1950 the dominant NBA team of the time, the Minneapolis Lakers, starring the league’s first superstar George Mikan, encountered the Fort Wayne Pistons. The Pistons won 19-18, the last quarter, 3-1. They weren’t going to allow Mikan on the ball, so they held on to it themselves for minutes at a time, taking only 13 shots all night.
No doubt the Contrarians would have said it was up to Mikan and the Lakers to find more effective ways to win the ball back. But others could see how ugly it was. “The Pistons,” wrote the St Paul Dispatch, “gave pro basketball a great black eye.”
Four years later the owner of the Syracuse Nationals came up with an experiment during a practice game among his own players. Each team had just 24 seconds to shoot. “I looked at the box scores from the games I enjoyed,” Danny Biasone later explained, “games where they didn’t screw around and stall. I noticed each team took about 60 shots. That means 120 shots per game. So I took 48 minutes and divided that by 120 shots. The result was 24 seconds per shot.”
A few months later Biasone had convinced the NBA to adopt the 24-second shot-clock for the following season. His Nationals would end up winning that NBA championship. More so he’d saved the NBA.
Last Saturday night was not the death of football. But it was another game that left it with a big black eye. It needs a Biasone to study the games that have thrilled us and suitably put a primacy on creativity over destruction (a maximum 10 defenders in your own half?). Burns might just be or find the very man.
