Brendan O'Brien: New rules offer hope that Gaelic football can be saved after all

It was unfamiliar. Weird, even, but ultimately undeniable. Hope.

18 October 2024; Umpire Ben Woods waves the red flag, for a two point score, during the Allianz GAA Football Interprovincial Championship semi-final match between Leinster and Connacht at Croke Park in Dublin. Photo by Piaras Ó Mídheach/Sportsfile

It took root slowly. So did the understanding, and the acceptance, that said root had taken.

Because this was unfamiliar. Weird, even, but ultimately undeniable. Hope. There, we said it. A sense of possibility and positivity. A hint of light just as winter’s grip was squeezing the daylight hours.

Gaelic football was looking up again after years of feeling, and being beaten, down.

Somehow, a hastily-arranged weekend of action, in an interprovincial format long since dispensed with as obsolete by the GAA, was the new way forward.

And this in the middle of October, and at a Croke Park that promised to be far less colourful and crammed than for the rugby a week earlier.

There was no request or order from the bosses to go along to GAA HQ, just something telling us we couldn’t, shouldn’t, stay away.

That this could be the moment when Jim Gavin and his army of reformers, having approached the Rubicon, would make the crossing from the Mordor of the modern game into a Shire of plenty and contentment.

So, no pressure then.

Would it really be different? Previous tweaks here and band aids there had done nothing to release the shackles of negativity and over-coaching from a game that had once, for all its ills back in the day, been a spectacle that was far more likely to get the blood running and the heart beating.

Gavin and his apostles had preached the good word throughout the land for months, reinforcing their 42 new rules and the seven core commandments.

Word is that the former Dublin manager had been working the phones for weeks, furnishing clarifications and soothing fears one domino at a time.

Many of their innovations have met with widespread encouragement, some with reservation, but what the Football Review Committee had sold most of all was a dream.

That football doesn’t have to be like that anymore. That it can make us believe again. Don Draper would raise a tumbler in appreciation at the slickness of the pitch.

The debate up until Friday night’s games in Dublin had been held within the echo chamber of the GAA’s traditional base.

That’s understandable but there is a much wider constituency that is there to be persuaded. The Dubs didn’t fill Croker all those years with 82,000 zealots. Whole rows were filled by people with more catholic sporting tastes.

Leinster goalkeeper Stephen Cluxton during the Allianz GAA Football Interprovincial Championship semi-final match between Leinster and Connacht at Croke Park in Dublin. Photo by Brendan Moran/Sportsfile

Here was the chance to bring them back into the fold, too.

All of which read as crazy optimism when you watched referee Martin McNally throw the ball in at six o’clock as Dublin was busy with rush hour.

The emptiness of the stands stood sentry to everyone’s doubts and the playground bully nature of Leinster’s beating at Connacht’s hands in the opener didn’t help.

There were two-point attempts made from outside the new 40-metre arc that would have risked expulsion from an inter-county panel had they happened in the midst of the Championship.

Journalists on duty spent the first quarter puzzling over the reason for different frees and other sights struck a discordant note.

The third quarter wasn’t long on when Leinster’s Evan O’Carroll, one of three men tasked with staying inside the opposition territory, had to stop himself from chasing a pass to Connacht goalkeeper Connor Gleeson who stood just the other side of the hallway line.

Gleeson duly roamed upfield and set up a goal for Barry McNulty.

It looked clunky. Alien.

The NFL has a rule whereby only five of the eleven players on offense can receive a pass. American football has many attractions but you would want similarities between its rulebook and that of Gaelic football to be kept at a minimum. Count that as one of those unknown unknowns we were bound to encounter.

FRC members James Horan and Colm Collins were asked for their views after that first game but the soundings even then were largely positive from the players.

The second game helped again given just one kick of a ball separated Ulster and Munster up to the point where the hooter shattered more eardrums.

Inevitably, there were as many questions raised as answers provided. Maybe chief among them was another unknowable: how would all this translate when the stakes are raised in the National League or All-Ireland arena?

For now, Gavin expressed himself happy that what they had seen had been within the framework expected.

Tweaks will be inevitable. Maybe even root and branch change to some of the new changes themselves? Niall Morgan showed that attempts to curtail the goalkeeper’s influence can be circumnavigated. Spectacularly. 

Then there was the sheer physical ask on the players, especially the eleven at the back, which was enormous even to an untrained eye.

Munster manager John Cleary spoke of players being “out on their feet” and this was after four 15-minute quarters.

What about when they have to play 70? Well, the term ‘rolling subs’ got mentions.

Gavin punted that one further down the road although some will see it as a step too far towards Aussie Rules.

And on it goes. A promising start. Maybe this game can be saved after all.