Kieran Shannon: Which teams will benefit most from the FRC's new rule changes? - either way it's exciting times for the GAA
GAA Football Review Committee chairperson Jim Gavin speaking during the GAA Special Congress.
In all the column inches that have been dedicated to how Jim Gavin masterly sailed his committee’s ‘enhancements’ through Special Congress, there was little to no mention of how it coincided with a significant anniversary in his life and football itself.
It was precisely five years ago last Saturday that he walked into another room on the northside of Dublin city consisting mostly of men and informed them, as only he could phrase it, that he was “handing back the reins of the Dublin senior football team to the county committee”.
Unlike Croke Park last Saturday, tears were shed as Gavin spoke to his audience that morning; while it did not necessarily signal the end of Dublin’s dominance, everyone in the room knew it undoubtedly marked the end of something special. The team had just completed an unprecedented five All Irelands in a row, won six out of a possible seven All Irelands during his tenure. They’d also contested six out of a possible seven league finals, winning five of them. No team, not even O’Dwyer’s Kerry, Cody’s Kilkenny or Kiely’s Limerick, had amassed silverware at such a rate.
In the five subsequent years Dessie Farrell has done a manful job as Gavin’s successor.
Like Gavin, he has won every game in Leinster and only once has failed to have Dublin place in the top two of their division in the national league (albeit they were relegated that particular season, and haven’t actually won a Division One league final in that period, a shortcoming which can’t be solely attributed to the disruption that was Covid).
And he has delivered two All Irelands. Nothing to be sniffed at and more than anyone else has landed in that timespan. The only three championship games he has lost have all been either by just a point or after extra-time in an All Ireland semi-final. Combine his playing career with his spell as GPA CEO, along with his time as a Dublin U21 and now senor manager, and his impact on the Gaelic Games landscape is one of the few over the last 30 years that’s been as impressive and as influential as Gavin’s time on the field, on the sideline and now navigating the GAA’s committee rooms and corridors of power as well.
Still, Dublin aren’t what they were back in Gavin’s time, through no fault of anyone’s, especially Farrell’s.
And now after what Gavin presented last Saturday in Croke Park, Gaelic football itself is in a totally different place.
Next Saturday is when teams can officially return to collective training on the field. And not since 2012 will so many of them take to that training field buoyed by and believing in the notion that the upcoming season might just be theirs.
Back in those pre-Gavin times people saw Dublin’s 2011 win over Kerry not as the start of an era of Dublin’s dominance but as the end of Kerry, Tyrone and Cork between them winning every national trophy that was going. Donegal and Mayo duly rose up to contest the subsequent All Ireland final, having just two years earlier been the first two teams eliminated from the 2010 championship. As McGuiness put it in his book, “No one saw that coming,” even at the start of the 2012 championship, bar possibly McGuiness himself and James Horan going by the markers their sides set in some feisty challenge games against one another.
Armagh-Galway last season was just as unforeseen a final pairing, prompting all kinds of possibilities of who might be the last two teams standing next July. Would you be at all surprised if it was Tyrone-Kerry? Or Derry-Galway? Or Armagh-Dublin? Or even Donegal-Mayo again, as worrying as it is for the latter that Cillian O’Connor has opted out for the year?
That though is not what will be most intriguing about Football 2025. People want less an open championship as open football again.
Armagh-Galway should have captured the imagination both before and after its happening much the way the Clare-Cork hurling final did, between the talent on display and the craving both counties and the country itself had for new champions. Two years earlier both teams treated us to a thrilling shootout ever before it went to penalties. Among their ranks were stellar talents like Comer, Walsh, O’Neill, Grugan. And yet the most-talked about individual on the field while the game was in play ended up being an injured seagull.
How football is played and won matters, more so than who wins. At least in 2025.
But of course they’re interlinked. Who will adapt best to the new ‘enhancements’? Who will exploit them best? Test them most?
The football brains tasked with such a challenge are almost as impressive as those who devised the new rules: an alternative Football Review Committee if you will. Jack O’Connor is one of the wiliest football men the game has known; his new coach, Cian O’Neill, one of the most experienced and respected as well as well-respected, not unalike his predecessor now back in Derry, Paddy Tally. You’ve McGuinness himself. McGeeney. O’Rourke. Farrell. How with the new rules and playthings will they utilise talents like Clifford, Morgan, a returning Murphy, Canavan, O’Neill, Con?
But yet the most influential set of managers will remain those former ones that constitute the FRC, and no one more so than Gavin himself. As he stressed last Saturday, in a way his group’s work is only beginning. And the real genius of his leadership of the FRC is not that all their motions passed by the kind of percentages that resembled Dublin’s winning record under him but that he has ensured that the FRC through Central Council can suitably adjust and tweak any current or future enhancements in-season. No one or no group has had that power or flexibility before.
But then football has rarely had someone like Gavin before.
Still influencing the game all these years on from finishing up with its greatest ever team.
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