AS A MAN ARMED with one of the biggest boots in the game, former Kerry player Bryan Sheehan has been heartened to hear the whispers and murmurs coming out of Jim Gavin’s Football Review Committee.
The notion of two points instead of one for a successful long-range kick from outside a certain zone would undoubtedly change, and possibly transform how the game is played. It is understood to be one of the strong recommendations the committee will present.
Speaking on a zoom call for the launch of the Electric Ireland All Ireland Minor Championship Launch, Sheehan said, “I think it’s a good idea. You are encouraging footballers to be able to kick the ball over the bar.
“I think at the moment, we are training athletes to play football. Rather than footballers to play football.
“We have athletes who can run all day and handpass the ball, to tackle and get turnovers. But you look at intercounty football and how many intercounty footballers can kick the ball over the bar from 35, 40 yards?
“There’s only a handful. I the whole country, there’s only about 15 I think can possibly do it on a consistent basis.
“So I think, yes, it’s something that can be looked at and I think you’d have the likes of Paul Mannion and David Clifford and these boys who could kick scores from distance because it’s a skill that’s dying out.
“And a lot of the football now is so defensive, if you can kick the ball over the bar from 40 yards, it would get rid of that tactic and teams would start getting footballers to kick the long-distance points.”
When it comes to that particular art, few could ever hope to have the experience that Sheehan had at St Mary’s Cahirciveen, where he grew up as an unofficial ball boy to Maurice Fitzgerald.
From he was an under-12 player, he was already kicking his frees off the ground.
“Maurice was playing senior football when I was growing up and I grew up idolising Maurice,” he explains.
The skill never changed and he continued to grow and get better until he was one of the finest exponents of his generation.
“There were times when you would have been around the ground and kicking the ball back out to him. Watching him and learning from him, trying to do what he did. That’s where it all kicked off,” he says.
Kicking the ball back out was no hassle. As a three-year Kerry minor, he spent the first two years in goals, before moving up to the forwards in his final year.
So when he went to the pitch, kicking out to him was another chance to work on his kickouts.
“Maurice would take his shots, I would do my kickouts, a few frees, he would take a few penalties and we both benefitted each other,” he says.
“It worked out nicely that I could pick it up as to his general work ethic, the time he was putting in to his kicking. I learned from that myself; ‘ok, he is doing this, and that’s how good he is, that’s what I need to do as well.’”
Putting the hours in was never a problem to the young Sheehan. But he admits to a certain blessing of genetics that other freetakers haven’t benefitted from. Kicking off the ground has been the curse of other celebrated dead-ball specialists such as Oisin McConville, who suffered with a bad back and had to curtail his hours of practise.
“I suppose I was blessed that I didn’t have any injuries so I could afford to put time into it. If I was in someone else’s shoes and had injuries, then obviously you can’t afford to be kicking if you are injured,” Sheehan says.
“I never had a groin problem or hips or anything like that. I can only put it down to my technique. I think over time I just developed a good technique and therefore I didn’t come under pressure or do any damage to my body, so that helped me. It allowed me to do more.”
By now, he is safely between the posts again as a goalkeeper. But he is still able to slot kicks over.
Bryan Sheehan frees off the deck >>>
— Daniel Hussey (@DanielHussey2) October 23, 2023
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“Before training I would do my kicking, I didn’t really put a number on it. When I was in my younger days, I could have spent fifteen minutes before and fifteen minutes after as well.
“In my latter years, I would always get my time in during the week of a game, I would get two, maybe three, sessions in myself. If I had a big game on a Sunday, I would spend an hour kicking on the Saturday.”
As his career wore on, the gym became a time-vampire. General fatigue from heavy training sessions also left the appetite for ‘extras’ diminished.
Kerry may have the Munster championship and a handy opening round of the round robins win over Monaghan in the bag. But Sheehan is like any Kerryman; he goes searching for the areas of concern as the Kingdom seek to regain the All-Ireland crown from Dublin.
“I think there are concerns, but I think there is optimism because you have a couple of games to sort this out,” he says.
“But my concern would be… Kerry need to be beating Cork, to be fair. That just means there is more room for improvement. What matters is that Cork for the first 15 minutes ran through Kerry and that’s a concern for Kerry at the moment; teams are coming down through the middle and scoring goals.
“The year Kerry won the All-Ireland, they barely conceded any goals, so that’s a thing to sort out at the moment.
“Cork ran through them, Monaghan had a couple of chances. Everyone says they need to start working on it. They had it down to a tee two years ago, they weren’t conceding goals and if you are not conceding goals you are going to be hard to beat and when you have that calibre of forwards, they are going to be getting you scores.
“But concede a goal or two and you are making life difficult for yourself.”
