THE DRAWN DUBLIN-KERRY game from 2001 got a play on our TV the other night. The past truly is a foreign country when it comes to Gaelic football.
We got lucky with our vantage point that day. What seemed like good seats down near the ’45 became great seats when Maurice Fitzgerald lined up a sideline with time running out. The arc of the ball remains vivid, its flight from left to right more pronounced from just behind the kicker. Before the ball landed you knew you’d seen something remarkable.
The game was memorable for other reasons: The atmosphere created by the Dublin supporters from around half-time. The Dublin supporters giving out about the traffic which meant they only arrived in force from around half-time. Everyone else giving out about Dublin people giving out about match traffic like it was a new thing. Vinny Murphy’s introduction and the subsequent dunting and shoving which dialled the atmosphere up again. Tommy Carr legging it onto the field to shout in the face of the ref. Dublin’s unlikely comeback before the game’s stunning conclusion.
But the run of play? I’d forgotten about that until confronted with it the other night. It was jarring. Some of the finishing from Dublin forwards was comically poor. The decision making beggars belief when compared to today. Watching felt like hopping from a modern automatic into a Fiat Uno with four gears.
Yet . . . it was still a compelling game. Every time I thought to fast forward to the equalising point, I couldn’t. Why was it so hard to turn away from this?
The answer I felt was in the rarity of a backwards step. If the ball did go back, it was a one-time thing and for a net loss of no more than three yards. The next action was to send it forward again, where possession would quite possibly be lost . . . But sure it’ll be coming back this way anyway and we’ll live to fight then.
Football was a great game when played entirely without guile. Well, guile and invention were present in abundance, but more on an individual, spontaneous level.
Gaelic football is hardly the only sport where the intellectualisation of coaching has improved the efficiency of play but sent boredom levels to an unforeseen high. Yet it is a fairly acute case.
This depends on who you listen to, of course. A friend who has a rare passion for the game believes the consistent criticism is driven by the Dublin media and there is not much to be fixed. The rule changes are not just excessive but destructive.
Now, anybody with an eye on the Dublin-based national media knows that its foot soldiers like little more than to come up with an opinion that sticks it to the Dublin-based national media, and therefore aligns themselves with the untainted realist on the ground who knows what’s going on.
Tempting and all as that is here, we can’t go along. Football has become too grim an act to defend. There have been good games in this and recent years but the examples of non-events are too numerous and depressing to list. The spectacle is objectively poor a lot of the time.
What’s remarkable is how crowds and interest have held up despite this. The passion that exists for Gaelic football is so strong that people are willing to build their day around going to a game they know will probably be bad.
To me, the turnout for a sport or a club in the dark times best shows its status. Everton and Tottenham Hotspur have continued to pack their ground and away ends for decades despite a lack of success. This marks them out as big clubs more than silverware. Manchester City took thousands on the road when in the third flight, a more impressive feat than four titles in a row with a load of outside money.
Gaelic continues to pull crowds because people have so much time for the sport despite the obvious flaws. It is embedded in Irish life like few other pursuits. Where I live is similar to many parts of the country. Casual conversation weaves in and out of the local club championship and the county side at that time of year. You have to go to a good few games to be part of the chat.
There’s the need to participate, but also a willingness to be thrilled. Even with football at perhaps its lowest ebb there are still things you’ll see in a game which make you stop and appreciate the moment.
Gaelic football is not new to bouts of introspection. Even during the noughties, seen now with the benefit of hindsight as a golden era for the game, a time where coaching innovation had not yet led to excessive caution, there was talk of the undefined tackle.
Then there was always the comparison with hurling, a sport that has never lacked for self worth.
We’ve become accustomed to a curious duality: a game phenomenally popular to watch and play, in parallel throes of existentialism and self loathing.
The feeling remains though that the pessimism is warranted now, if not in the past. The inter-provincial games at the weekend, flaws and all, were part of a good faith attempt by good people to improve things. Jim Gavin, chair of the football review committee, wrote in the Sports Chronicle in 2020 as a kind of pragmatic mystic: “I’ve never seen the perfect meeting. I’ve never seen the perfect flight. I’ve never seen the perfect match. It’s like infinity, it’s just beyond the horizon.”
If anybody is able to process us closer to that horizon of hypothetical perfection than we are now, then you’d trust Gavin and co. The multitudes of supporters who have kept the turnstiles clicking through some indifferent days deserve a bit of forward progress after years of side to side.
Perhaps the committee will come to curtail the backward pass; impose a momentum and principle which teams once imposed upon themselves.
