Tony Leen: Who in the GAA's high towers and low fields is exercised enough to stoke football's big conversation?

You will read next to nothing new here. To all intents and purposes, Gaelic football’s risk for reward has been flushed down the pooper

PRESSURE POINT: Kerry manager James Costello is energised as his players force a turnover against Tyrone in the All-Ireland MFC quarter-final against Tyrone in Portlaoise. 

ON any considered list of the poorest Gaelic football games of 2022, the shocking Cork-Louth All-Ireland SFC qualifier on June 4 deserves universal derision, but dishonourable mention should be made too of Kerry’s 0-8 to 1-4 All-Ireland MFC quarter-final slog against Tyrone in Portlaoise a fortnight ago.

Whatever of Louth’s miserly intent at Páirc Ui Chaoimh in the senior grade, the scariest part of the trench warfare in Portlaoise on June 11 was the punch-in-the-nose realisation that this may be the awful, grim expression of football’s future.

Not that Tyrone merit a pass because we expect it, but for Kerry - the last outpost of putting boot to ball for expression - the sight of impressionable young lads and a keeper hunkered behind the ball is a fair indicator that, to all intents and purposes, Gaelic football’s risk for reward has been flushed down the pooper.

Football has spent so much time in recent years fretting over and dividing the calendar that everyone parked consideration of the game itself. The cyclical nature of trends has seduced some into believing that, in time, the ship will right itself. We blithely ignored the Under 14 team living out their coach’s vicarious plan to set the ultimate sporting traps in his or her own half of the field.

Who in the high towers and low fields is exercised enough to stoke the debate? Where in the GAA firmament is the maverick who spies this appalling vista in plain view and is perturbed enough by those eerie silences at matches now, the mid-match moments when spectators, winning or defeated, lose the will to support, falling mute and nauseous?

There have been rules revisions for sure, some helpful. But the 2018 research conducted by Patricia Lynch and Rob Carroll revealing the explosion in lengthy hand-passing sequences in Gaelic football only confirmed what many feared.

Every sport grapples with suffocation of talent and the subjugation of positive intent. Be it rugby, soccer, American Football, basketball or any other, there are restrictions and limitations to where a player can be and must not be on the court or field of play. Rulemakers stay ahead of the game and if they don’t, the slippery dicks - as that good man Ben Flahive once called them - drive coach and horses through good intent.

Gaelic football (and hurling of course), remain two of the few field sports where a player can roam free to all corners of the pitch. The problem now for football is that the magnetic draw is backwards towards their own goal, not forwards.

Aside from necessitating the second referee to police it, is it too great a stretch to ensure that the defending team in Gaelic football can have a maximum of ten outfield players in their own half at any one time – and must keep four players in the top half of the pitch? 

Don’t blame this year’s Kerry minors for setting up in a low block against a similarly-minded Tyrone side. They laughed last. Nothing in the rules prescribed winning with hearts and kisses. On the same minor quarter-final bill in Portlaoise that afternoon, Munster champions Cork played Derry, beaten by Tyrone in the provincial series. 

The Cork management had a firm idea of what they were facing but opted to play their front-foot football. They lost 0-12 to 0-6 (as a by the way, keep an eye out for Derry midfielder Ruairi Forbes). If Michael O’Brien, the Cork manager, had his time back, he would forsake his principles for a place in this weekend’s All-Ireland semi-final in Parnell Park against Galway. Until someone dictates otherwise, the pressure and fear of failure will drive Gaelic football into low blocks and depopulated halves. 

The senior game is already there and we feign intrigue whether Side A can thread their way through Side B’s labyrinthine set-up. But the concern for Under 17s is so much greater because boys (and girls) still want to have fun. All the while, the GAA is battling for numbers and quality against the muscle of money.

At the risk of apportioning total responsibility to Kerry for saving football, there were particular circumstances to their Portlaoise dilemma. Ten days beforehand, they got handed the dog licence by Cork in the Munster final in Páirc Ui Rinn, which set them on a course with Tyrone for the semi-final. The manager James Costello articulated afterwards the difficulty of being a 16 or 17-year-old minor.

“We put down a very tough week after Cork. We had lads who said they were afraid to go down to their pitch for a kickaround because they didn’t want to meet fellas. They go from the highs of pats on the backs to the lows of crossing the road to avoid people. These are incredible learnings for seventeen-year-olds to get.” 

BALLER: Derry's Ruairi Forbes wins midfield possession against Cork in their All-Ireland MFC semi-final. 

Against this backdrop is the concern of whether 16-17-year-olds should be the minor grade at all, a hot topic of debate, one assumes, on a new Age Grade workshop committee in Croke Park. It is examining whether the change in 2018 from U18 to U17 has worked or not – and is charged with coming up with proposals on the under-age grades and structures for Central Council to go forward to a special Congress towards the end of the year.

Within that process, there are several important considerations, not least of which is the overriding goal of making the minor grade less competitive and more developmental. It is the reason that the minor blue ribands are no longer played as curtain-raisers to the senior finals.

There is consensus already that above the developmental grade, there will remain only one other pre-adult grade. The reasons for dropping the minor age from U18 to U17 were sound - to decouple it from adult competition, limiting the risk of burnout, to avoid Leaving Cert complications and to accentuate the developmental accent. But the change has brought issues with regard to the school cycle – this writer is involved with a team of minors who are only going into 5th year in September and will be gone from the minor grade as things stand.

Is an Under 19 grade the answer, instead of the Under 20? Does the club system have to ape its inter-county equivalent at all? Where development may be the primary goal on the big stage, club players want games. So should the minor grade go back to Under 18? There is no stricture on age grades within a county. Kildare innovated during Covid with a very competitive Under 23 football championship, attracting a cohort of players who might otherwise have disappeared in the crack between under age and adult.

How relevant is any of that if good men and women do nothing? Saturday’s All-Ireland minor football semi-finals are in Tullamore and Parnell Park and will play second fiddle to the festival of football on Jones’ Road. Over 70,000 have been drawn to Croke Park Sunday, not necessarily to witness the rekindling of the Kerry-Mayo rivalry - more to savour the prospect of two kicking teams, Galway and Armagh, playing a bit of streetball.

Not that the seventeen-year-olds will go under the radar. Both games are live Saturday on TG4 with Kerry’s opponents, Mayo, considered the form horse of the four. How will Kerry set up again them? James Costello and his management are responsible for nothing less than progressing their charges to the All-Ireland final. After Tyrone, he acknowledged it was “100% about getting over the line.” He has also lost the final game of their campaign by one point in each of the last three years. What’s he going to do?

Blame the synagogue, not the sinners.