Armagh's Burns wary of wasted year with rule changes

Burns said he enjoyed the interpro trial games but has reservations about bringing in the 'enhanced rules' in their entirety for 2025.

The Ulster team celebrate after the final with GAA President Jarlath Burns. Pic ©INPHO/Ben Brady

All-Ireland winning Armagh defender Paddy Burns says he's in two minds about Gaelic football's new rules.

Burns played for Ulster over the weekend as they defeated, firstly, Munster and then Connacht to claim the interprovincial series title.

Burns said he enjoyed the games and the occasion with Ulster eventually overcoming Connacht in a penalty shootout, but the Burren club man expressed reservations about bringing in the 'enhanced rules' in their entirety for 2025.

"So I’m 31, I probably don't have a whole pile of years left and I do have a slight concern that the game that I'm playing and putting so much time into, that we're going to try something completely different for a few months," said Burns.

"It feels too big a deal to be trying something and then it might fall away for the championship or it might stay, I don't know. It’s difficult to think that you could be putting in your last year, or last two years, but for one of them you could look back in four or five years and say, 'Well, we tried that for a year and then it was parked'.

"So that's where I have a little bit of nervousness around it but I suppose the counterpoint to that is well when else can you try it? It needs to happen in competitive games to see if it works. So you win some, you lose some. It's just one of those things, you probably have to give it a go."

Burns said that it was evident to him that when the best Gaelic footballers came together for the weekend, they quickly got to grips with the FRC's new rules.

"They're the players who can pick this up the quickest and so it made sense to use us to trial it and, yeah, see how we adapt over the two days," said Burns.

"We watched the first game on Friday night, the first half of it anyway, and we saw that they had two-point shooters. So we knew that we needed to sort of push out on that arc. But at the same time there is still the opportunity to get your 11 players deep and to sit in, so we talked about that too, about trying to just close that area and not make one pointers easy.

"I suppose what I'm getting across to you there is we talked about it, we definitely had conversations about it and we adapted our approach for the final based on what we'd seen and how we felt we played on Friday."