Christy O'Connor: Modern teams are more hung up on precision and percentages than distance

Gym work has made modern players far more powerful but greater distance in their striking was just a by-product of that physical empowerment

POC FADA: Patrick Horgan of Cork takes a free. Photo by Piaras Ó Mídheach/Sportsfile

In a discussion last week, Gearóid Hegarty mentioned how he loves watching, analysing and dissecting old games. Recently, the Kilkenny-Waterford All-Ireland final popped up on his YouTube page and Hegarty decided to have a peep.

One sequence of play caught his eye. “There was a score in that game from about 100 yards just underneath the Hogan Stand, similar to the one I got this year (in the All-Ireland final),” he said. “I was just thinking ‘Isn’t that funny now that everyone talks about the ball travelling so much further nowadays than it used to’.