Diagnosing the problem is the first problem

Gaelic football has never been in a worse place - that seems to be the accepted fact across the entire island with only the small sliver of shining light across the horizon of doom and gloom for the country’s most popular field sport.

That’s a tough consensus to break down because, and we’ve all sat through club and county games that leave you bored out of your mind as teams go out with the admittedly completely understandable priority of not losing the game.

To be honest, that has to be the first priority of any coach and if it's not, he’d be gone first thing in the morning!
How you achieve that goal seems to be the problem! The old American football adage that ‘offence win games, defence win championships’ is easily applicable to any field game, it is as true today in the Premier League or Rugby’s Champions Cup as it is in the battle for the Sam Maguire.

Some like Pep Guardiola or the great Lionel Messi inspired Barcelona team go all out in attack, figuring that if you’re high up the field, holding onto the ball and running the opposition ragged, well they’re not going to be fit to do damage at the other end. The problem there is if they do get the chance, leaving yourself light at the back can be disastrous.

Jim Gavin’s Dublin famously played some of the most wonderful front foot football in 2013 and right up until the time that Jim McGuinness and his Donegal team ambushed them in the 2014 All-Ireland Semi-Final.

McGuinness doesn’t get enough credit for his in-game moves that tilted the game Donegal’s way that day but he also doesn’t get enough blame for the way Gaelic Football has tilted since then.

What people most remember about that Donegal victory was their massed defence, the structured way they dropped back to stymie a potent Dublin attack, but they’re less inclined to remember the quality of players at McGuinness’ disposal!

Michael Murphy, despite winning only one All-Ireland, is up there with the best footballers of the past quarter century.
Colm McFadden, the McGee brothers, Karl Lacey, Mark McHugh, Rory Kavanagh would grace any team and any era but the message coaches seemed to take out of it was that systems rather than players are more important and here we are ten years later, the logical conclusion of McGuinness’s mad genius on the fields of Ireland every week.

The Dubs aren’t exempt from criticism either - Jim Gavin was pilloried from pillar to post as tactically naive and over confident after that famous September day ambush but the former Dublin manager learned his lesson and as teams floundered against the massed defence, he came up with the template to beat it.

Unfortunately, that entailed safety first football, holding onto possession for prolonged periods, getting bodies back and utilising basketball defensive screening and low blocks, probing and probing in attack until a gap opened up and then, cue the cavalry!

It was so successful that every major football county virtually adopts it nowadays but it does tend to drain the excitement from a game - is there any difference between any of the major teams nowadays?

The only time football breaks from its shell is when two evenly matched teams who also happen to believe they are innately better than their opponents come to face to face - the natural arrogance of the Dubs, the Kingdom and even Mayo mean you tend to get front foot attacking football, but even one of the game’s great entertainers in Galway have become disciples of safety first football.

Suggestions abound about what to do - some suggest no back pass once the ball crosses the half way line or, a la basketball, a 30 second limit to get your shot off and even team fouls that result in an automatic 13 metre free once a limit is exceeded?

How about reducing the number of consecutive handpasses or even banning the handpass altogether, kick-outs having to go beyond the 50 yard line, teams having to keep at least four players inside the opposition half at all times, or even reducing teams to 13 a side to open up more space.

On the face of it, all those are laudable goals but I wonder how hard they’d be to enforce? Imagine policing the 50 yard kick-out on a day when the wind is blowing right down the field in Pearse Stadium in Galway? Who is going to count how many players are in the other half of the pitch? And if there was a shot-clock in operation, the smart coach would frustrate the opposition down in their own half to hold up play? Or does the clock restart after every hold-up?

We talk about the rules of the game and how hard they are to implement but how does an already overburdened referee apply these new suggestions? Does it only apply to inter-county senior level? What about juvenile football, what happens there?

Something has got to be done, certainly but as we’ve found over the years, once a rule is brought in, smart coaches and players will find ways to circumvent the new rule.
Just look at the attacking mark, brought in to encourage high fielding, nobody delivers a long ball in on top of the big full-forward.

But the law of unintended consequences means we’re more likely to see a scenario like when Scotstown’s Kieran Hughes fielded a ball in complete isolation over on the wing to tie their Ulster Semi-Final against Kilcoo.

There was nothing remotely attacking about the move, I doubt the ball advanced even five metres further up the field but it did travel 20 or 30 metres across the field so it was perfectly legal!

No matter what the purists say, Gaelic Football has never been at a higher level in terms of skills, fitness and competitiveness than it is now, it is just the game has morphed into a safety first philosophy that sucks the life out of the game, although if you lose a County Final thanks to an overly ambitious pass across the face of your own goal, I’d expect you're fine about that.

Soccer, rugby and Gaelic Football have all become far more technical and tactical than they were 25 years ago, players have never been better, fitter or faster, but until you can come up with a philosophy that rewards risk and ambition, coaches are always going to find their way around whatever new-fangled rules we might come up with to reinvent the wheel!