Inverted attacks to double gaps: the new championship jargon you need to know

Take shelter from jargon under Gaelic football’s umbrella.

A dense language now has to be interpreted and parsed as we watch lads throw the ball to each other on the football field. Pic: Piaras Ó Mídheach/Sportsfile

RUGBY, of course, is the sport most entangled in the weeds of jargon. That made sense, to some extent, as gurus sought to convince the punter that the rudimentary spectacle concealed highly scientific workings below the bonnet. So rooting and tearing and dragging became jackaling and latches and crocodile rolling and truck and trailer and all the rest of it.

Soccer, with a guru lurking now at every corner, had to fall victim. So a colourful vernacular born early doors on the streets and parks has seen ‘loading it into the mixer’ give way to the bureaucracy of ‘more verticality’ and ‘ball progression’ and ‘connecting the thirds’.

Hurling, largely, has proved resistant to this disease, not having the time for it, mainly, at least while the games are going on. Sure, it has become worryingly preoccupied with offloads. It also added turnovers to its diligent counting of hooks and blocks. But by and large, despite the increasingly complicated gameplans, hurling is wary of the devil in the detail, and remains content that wristiness is closest to godliness.

Gaelic football, despite some improvements, still has plenty of time to kill during the matches, and has gone down another road into a forest of verbiage. Gaelic football coaching workshops are the new apartments in Bulgaria, and as a consequence a dense language has evolved that must be interpreted and parsed.

The first manifestation of football’s new addiction came with an obligation to throw in basketball phrases wherever possible (they also love their jargon in and around the paint). So whenever a Gaelic footballer without the ball changes direction nowadays, it is obligatory to call it a ‘backdoor cut’.

Gaelic has borrowed plenty from the ‘ground football’ too, whether it likes it or not. It took to ‘rest defence’, for example, like a duck to water. And they love their ‘pressing triggers’.

Maybe there was a secret wing of the FRC involved, but football quickly developed the strut to roll out its own lingo. It was a proud day when the ‘umbrella defence’ was unveiled — seemingly a curved defensive shape across the arc to block all shooting lanes. Perhaps that was a watershed moment because now you have to contend with a whole lot more:

CHAIN REACTION: Cathal Kehoe of Wexford handpasses the ball. Photo: Tom Beary/Sportsfile

Handpass chains: Any time two or three lads chuck the ball to each other;

The patience phase: Any time three of four lads chuck the ball to each other;

Collapse defence: When the umbrella is taken down and they huddle close to protect against a storm coming down the middle;

Hybrid zone: When the backs are spreading out and marking up at the same time;

Inverted attacks: When the lad you picked wing-back goes rogue up the middle;

Double gaps: When the attack moves around a bit to create a ‘two-problem overload’ for the backs;

Screens: Obstruction, they’d call it, in soccer;

The pivot: Your lighthouse, standing still among the madness whirling all around;

Auxiliary pivot: Available for duty should the other lad fall asleep from standing still;

Plus-2s and 3s: Even hurling came to terms with the plus-1, so naturally football took out its abacus;

Tagger: Marking your man is gone so out of fashion that they had to bring in Aussie Rules lingo to convince any young lad to do it;

Strike runner: A lad with a burst of pace surging into one of those double gaps;

Trail runner: A fella with less pace knocking around behind him looking for the ‘pop pass’.

This evolving dialect does pose many existential questions. Is the shift defence any different to the drift defence? Can you repurpose a traditional blanket defence into an umbrella?

But there’s little or no hope of keeping on top of it all. Maurice Brosnan, of this parish, on  The Gaelic Football Podcast, is probably your best bet, if you need an interpreter through the championship.

The guru on all matters, Paul Rouse, vows to provide a Linguaphone-style course on the pod soon, so email [e-mail] with any developments in this fast-moving space. For his own part, Rouser the coach promises to further expand the vernacular at his next training session, when he will be unveiling football’s first ‘false full-forward’.