Football: Change rules or we change the channel

The Donegal-Down game last Sunday was another stark reminder, to those who care, that the game of Gaelic football is in big trouble. It has become ultra-defensive and the overriding philosophy seems to be to stop the opposition from playing and pick up the debris left to try eke out a low-scoring win.

The Dublin-Donegal semi-final in 2011 should have been a red flag day for the GAA regarding the direction the game is heading. The managers are not to blame because they are playing within existing rules — but the rate at which things have deteriorated means the rules are going to have to be changed — and fast.

The footballing lexicon has changed from catch and kick to work-rate, intensity, blanket defences and sweepers, not to mention conditioning.

If a side does not employ a blanket defence, they’re seen as out of touch and prehistoric in a tactical sense. During the league game this year between Cork and Donegal, the man of the match, Andrew O’Sullivan, kicked the ball no more than three or four times by my reckoning, underlining how a new set of fundamentals have overtaken the finer skills of the game.

The football review committee have done good work to a certain extent, but they ignored the elephant in the room — the overuse of the hand-pass. Many of the problems they addressed, such as checking the man off the ball, came from the fact that Gaelic football has now, by and large, become a predominantly running and hand-passing game. One pundit last Sunday was forced to admit that the game stinks “but what can you do?”

I would submit there is plenty you can do to improve the game. The number one priority is to curtail the hand-pass to a maximum of two consecutive passes before the ball must be kicked. This would transform the game because teams would feel obliged to keep more players in the attacking half of the field or they would just be kicking the ball back to the opposition. They would have to work on structure and kicking through the different lines of the pitch. My favourite score in seven years in charge of Kerry came in the second minute of the All-Ireland quarter-final against Dublin in 2011. Tomás Ó Sé took a free on his own 45-metre line. It arrived in Mike McCarthy’s hands via two 40-yard foot-passes and two off-loads to a supporting player. McCarthy took one solo to draw the defender before slipping the ball to Gooch who hit the net. The point I am making is that solo running and hand-passing should be secondary to kicking. Sadly, in today’s game they are king.

The present-day managers who employ the blanket defence, and all that it entails, are not to blame because this option has always been there. There is no regulatory straitjacket debarring a manager from putting 13 men behind the ball. You can set up your 15 players any which way you like. Very clever men like Mickey Harte and now Jim McGuinness have looked outside the box and profited accordingly. They’re not overly bothered if football aesthetics becomes the collateral damage. Smart managers look at the players they have at their disposal and employ tactics to give them the best chance of success. It’s a bit tougher to do that in a place like Kerry where not alone are you expected to win but also to entertain. In the 2009 league, I employed Donnchadh Walsh as a sweeper in a couple of games and it was met with a mixture of shock and horror by the natives.

James McCartan realised in the build-up to last weekend’s Donegal game that he did not have the players to go gung-ho against them, so he decided to take Donegal on at their own game. He’s an intelligent fella and I feel he got his tactics spot on. The problem is that more and more teams will realise, just like Dublin did in 2011, that Donegal want to invite you onto them, turn you over and exploit the space at the back. That might be okay and permit some kind of spectacle if one team is attack-minded — even if the other is defensive. What saved the championship last year was that the teams Donegal faced after the Ulster championship such as Kerry, Cork and Mayo, were generally attack-minded.

However, when you have two very defensive teams, you have a war of attrition and the type of spectacle we had last Sunday in Breffni Park. Undoubtedly some of the aforementioned teams will set up more defensively in this year’s championship. Cork are a case in point if the evidence of the league is anything to go by. If they win an All-Ireland doing so, there will be few complaints from anyone on Leeside. But what is that doing to Gaelic football? There is a fundamental need now for a drastic change if the game is to breathe again. Soccer changed the offside and back-pass rules to make the game more attractive. Moreover, the rules of rugby union have been altered, such as at the breakdown, where the tackler must release and supporting players must stay on their feet to allow the ball to be recycled quickly. These changes have made the game more attractive as a spectacle.

GAA authorities need to ask themselves what kind of a game do we want and then introduce the changes which are necessary. Of course there will be opposition. I am certainly under no illusions here. Opposition will come from vested interests but this is where strong leadership is critical. Seán Kelly showed what can be achieved with strong leadership when he opened Croke Park to other codes of sport.

Hurling is a vastly superior product to football at present. One statistic jumped out at me last Sunday in the Munster semi-final in Limerick between Cork and Clare. Cork had hand-passed the ball 11 times by half-time. I reckon Donegal and Down had accumulated 11 hand-passes by the fifth minute.

In hurling, the ball is being moved more quickly into open spaces. Players find themselves one-on-one and the skilful players thrive. Ask any of the skilful players in Gaelic football if the code allows them to thrive and express their skills. Colm Cooper addressed that precise issue this week. The likes of Stephen O’Neill, Benny Coulter, Gooch and Jamie Clarke, all highly skilled players, are being shut out of games by sheer weight of numbers and every means possible. A lot of the time it is half-backs and even corner backs who finish up shooting at the posts.

There are vested interests reluctant to criticise the way the game is going at the moment, for various reasons. One of those reasons is they are making money out of the game and they don’t want to be seen to be attacking the goose that lays the golden egg. Those treasures are getting scarce. If things don’t change, and fast, they will become extinct altogether.