From pickouts to piggery: a modern keeper's restart roulette 

RESTART ROULETTE: Kerry's Shane Ryan looks to restart the match. Pic: Seb Daly/Sportsfile.

“I’m not going to preach to anyone about kicking,” is how David Clarke qualifies his comments about the transformation of the kick-out.

But the former Mayo goalkeeper is qualified to talk. Last October, a month shy of his 42nd birthday, the two-time All Star won his fifth senior county title with Ballina Stephenites.

He’s played and won through three ages of the kick-out: the lorry-it-out phase, the to-you, to-me short restart and the current beyond-the-arc kick almost necessitated by last year’s new rules.

It was in that middle era that he made a name for himself. “I built a career from pretty much kicking the ball into the corner and getting it back,” he laughs self-deprecatingly.

The elimination of the back-pass to the goalkeeper directly from a kick-out coupled with the kick-out having to go beyond the 40-metre arc seemed to be a perfect time for Clarke to bow out. But he was curious. The early inter-county fare last year indicated the game had become more exciting and a little simpler for the man between the sticks.

“I find it easier in one sense in that you tend to be going longer a lot more,” he says. “It’s more difficult to get off a short one because if you get it outside the arc and if it goes wrong there’s potentially a goal on every time. Maybe my limitations have helped me because I’m tending to go long now rather than trying to ping those ones 30 or 40 metres.

“I did like getting the ball back from short ones but this is far better. Really, who wants to see the goalkeepers soloing with the ball? As much as I’m a goalkeeper, when I started kicking the ball against the wall at the age of seven or eight, I wanted to be an outfield player.

“You want to see fellas catching high ball and fast breaks. There’s probably not as much high fielding as you might like with the amount of long ball that is going out there, but I think teams will get better. You’re seeing bigger men being brought into panels.” 

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An outfield player for Rathmore, Shane Ryan was something of a reluctant cúl báire too. But he joined Clarke as a two-time All Star last year when his adeptness at kicking off his left foot as well as his right foot proved a most useful tool.

The season before, Éamonn Fitzmaurice lauded his development. “He always could kick off the ground with his left foot, but he has taken it on a level in 2024,” Fitzmaurice wrote in these pages. “This makes him much harder to read and press.” 

The Football Review Committee (FRC) last year reported the average kick-out time as 20.2 seconds. At times in Croke Park, Ryan was taking less than eight seconds to get the ball back in play and Kerry were often profiting.

Before last year’s All-Ireland final, Ryan gave some of the best insight from a current player about the amended parameters of the kick-out.

“I suppose it depends on the time in the game, depends on the score in the game, depends on players that are out there. So, it's not a one-size-fits-all in terms of kick-outs. There's times you may go to a set play. There's times when you're just trying to see, you're trying to get out quick. Are there pockets anywhere?

"So, it depends on what's presenting in front of you. You're kind of very reactive to what the opposition are presenting you and particularly what the scoreboard is saying as well because, you might be up three points. There might be three minutes left. You might just need hands on ball. So, it depends what's presented in front of you.” 

It was Ryan’s assertion that the changes had put more of an onus on the keeper. “There is no team dropping off a kick-out, no team at any stage now. So, that's the first thing. All your kick-outs now there is some element of pressure on them.

"The second thing then obviously, the arc has condensed the space. So, your ability to break momentum in the game is a little bit more challenging now, because it's harder to get a guaranteed possession. And as always, a keeper is so reliant on what's outside him. He's only as good as the options that are given to him.” 

Like Clarke, Ryan has been happy to give up control for the sake of the game but the Mayo man would argue as a result the kick-out has become more of a “shared responsibility” for teams.

“Before, a lot more rested on the keeper because there was the shorter option and it was basically getting possession at all costs. Now, you’re trying to be consistent with where you’re putting the kick and having a system whereby you’re winning it and breaking from it.

“A lot of teams now aren’t doing stats simply on kick-outs won; they’re looking if the opposition’s 45-metre line has been passed as a result of that kick-out. It’s all well and good me kicking into the corner four times but if we’re being turned over three times after winning it, what’s the point? Getting inside their 45m line is a broader way of looking at it. Kerry are able to get the short kick off and away, others prefer the overloads. There’s a variety to the thing.” 

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Kieran McGeeney’s remarks about the kick-out in Roscommon last Sunday was picked up as much for his colourful choice of words as his commentary on the kick-out.

The “pure piggery” as he so described it was what both his old Armagh comrade Tony McEntee and Mickey Harte highlighted on the opening weekend of last year’s National Football League.

“The rule in the first place was to try and promote high fielding,” said McEntee. “You’re not going to get that. There are different groups of players in different parts of the field and it’s a mess in all honesty with you.” 

Harte concurs: “It just makes everything hustle and bustle in the middle of the field. It’s not giving a lot of clean catches or anything like that. It’s going to make more battles for the ball and if that’s exciting then so be it.” 

Just as it has propelled the large swings in games, the strong winds at this time of year has impacted the kick-out and is responsible for taking the skill out in the form of high-fielding, as McGeeney has claimed. The 14 Roscommon restarts breeze-assisted Armagh won in the second half was testament to that.

Some of the FRC-backed games intelligence unit’s work would appear to bear that out. In the fourth and fifth round of last year’s National Football League, just over 10% of kickouts were won clean beyond the 45m line. By the summer, it had risen to 13.6%. Small potatoes, you might think, but when contested kick-outs jumped from 26% in the 2024 championship to 63% last year, it’s not nothing.

Kick-outs are obviously a sensitive subject for McGeeney after what happened in the third quarter of last year’s All-Ireland quarter-final loss to Kerry. There may also be a reason why Ethan Rafferty is no longer considered a goalkeeper and Blaine Hughes has returned there.

Losing 12 of 14 kick-outs as the opposition kicked 15 points would spook anyone, and that day had nothing to do with the elements. Kicking wide left to an isolated Andrew Murnin carried risk. “Rafferty was trying to ping fellas without break zones and that caused them massive problems,” says Clarke. “You don’t win that clean, there is potentially more of the other team around you even though you’ve after creating space for a fella to run into space. There is definitely a skill in that because if you do it get clean, pass it off with three or four of the opposition around you, you could soon be bearing down on goal.

“If you’re going long and a team is pressing up on you and the ball breaks right for you, potentially it’s a four v three. On the flipside, you’d be conscious about break zones.

“If you’re trying to do that mid-range kick, you can be cut wide open. Rob Hennelly has been excellent at them. He’s getting an awful lot of them off in that mid-range. He can disguise to go to his left and then he’s able to set up those clean catches rather than kick long towards the overloads. I don’t see Mayo kicking towards massive, seven or eight-man overloads like other teams.” 

The overload is one of the most risk adverse options, Clarke argues. “If you win it and the other team has committed there, it can be open country for you if you break from it correctly. If you do lose it and have some kind of a safety valve at the back of it, it’s not the worst because everyone knows where it’s going.

“The overload is as good as any because at least you know where it’s going and if you lose, you can kind of slow it down. But you’re rolling the dice out there. Trying something fancy might work eight times out of 10 but the two times it doesn’t, you could be picking the ball out of the net.” 

Jeopardy. Chaos. Uncertainty. The public gets what the public wants. Pure piggery? Maybe. But it’s no pig in a poke.