It’s time we spoke up for football

There is a train in India that travels between Mumbai to Delhi, you’ve probably seen it in an old movie at some point.

It’s a train so packed with people, it’s standing room only. Bodies hanging out of every available window and door and sitting on top of carriages, clinging on for dear life.

That train reminds me a little of the crazed negativity that has swept across Gaelic football for the past two weeks. Of course, Joe Brolly has been the overly enthusiastic train driver, and he has it rolling down the tracks at a runaway speed. Everybody is jumping on. The game is dead, dying or in need of urgent care at the very least, according to most accounts. There’s no fun in it for the players anymore apparently; slaves, don’t you know.

They can’t even enjoy a pint for God’s sake, how’ll they ever survive?

For years now, we in Kerry, as well as most of the country, have had to endure Joe’s snide remarks and pantomime villain status, while he pontificated and eulogised about the virtues of the northern sides’ superior grit, organisation and teamwork. How they are all about the sum of their collective as opposed to relying on talented chokers like Gooch. How Kerry inevitably crumble in the face of the intensity and superior tactical nous of the defensive ‘systems’ of Armagh, Tyrone and of course the brilliance of the highly celebrated Jim McGuinness and Donegal.

Last year, he defiantly told us again that Kerry were gone, finished, washed up. Yet, despite his prophecy of doom, Kerry somehow managed to win both a minor and senior All-Ireland in the very same season that he proclaimed that the production line had ground to a halt in the Kingdom.

Of course, when the ‘system’ was eventually felled in last year’s decider, he then went on to lambast Kerry for joining the ‘dark side’. Damned if you do and damned if you don’t, kind of thinking.

Where’s the logic? Is the suggestion that Fitzmaurice shouldn’t have changed the way the Kerry team was set up to cope with the threat posed by Donegal? I mean, you don’t approach a tiger the same way you approach a puppy, do you? Joe seems to hark back to the good old days when the Irish rugby team of 20 years ago fed us a stable diet of tasteless moral victories. Teams should just go out there and do the same thing they did before and continue to get beaten?

Is it not a manager’s responsibility to create the best possible opportunity for his players to be successful? Is that not what Brian McIver tried to do for his Derry players against Dublin? It didn’t work out obviously, but he did it with the best interests of his players at heart, and subsequently took a hammering for it.

In my opinion, far too much emphasis has been placed on that game — a contest played out in driving rain and swirling wind. It was truly awful stuff to have to endure, but it was just a league game. We’ve had plenty of bad league games before, and we’ll have more in the future.

This whole hullabaloo is a little surreal to me.

Last Sunday in Omagh, we saw as good as a game of league football as you are ever likely to see. The fielding, kick-passing and score taking were of a very high standard by both teams. Yes, there were a lot of fouls, but that is going to come with the increased physicality in the game. Kerry committed nearly 20 more fouls that the Red Hand. A sure sign for Joe no doubt that Kerry are now the most cynical purveyors of the evil in the GAA.

How about Derry kicking 2-15 to Cork’s 1-11?

We shouldn’t get overly carried away about how healthy Gaelic football is this week as a result of a few cracking matches over the weekend. There must be a happy medium somewhere in between. I’m not a huge believer in the picture painted by statistics all the time, because you can manipulate them to support any side of an argument really, but the numbers suggest that this league has averaged close to 29 points per game, compared with just over 26 points per game back in 2001. It’s not all bad.

Every top team, including Kerry, are becoming competent at getting bodies back to create a defensive zone. The difference in most teams is how quickly and effectively they get out on the break and transition from that zone defence into attack.

Similar to the Donegal game in Tralee, Kerry showed great patience and width to probe the Tyrone defence before finding a shooting pocket to exploit, while Tyrone were running hard at Kerry and forcing overlaps all over the place. If you want to know how to beat the zone, watch last year’s All-Ireland final. Work on your kick-passing. Promote width on the pitch. Coaches should spend more time on breaking down the zone rather that practising building their own.

We should learn from our hurling counter parts, stop the scaremongering, and be as proud of the good games as we are downhearted at the bad ones.