CHRISTY O’CONNOR wasn’t leaving anything to chance.
One of the country’s most renowned hurling coaches, he had been recruited by Micheál Donoghue to work with the Galway goalkeepers. It was 2018, the first year of a new round-robin format in the provincial hurling championship, and Kilkenny were set to arrive in Pearse Stadium on the last weekend of May.
O’Connor was preoccupied with footage of TJ Reid in the build-up to the game, trying to get a read on his penalty-taking. Among all of hurling’s best penalty-takers then, Reid possessed a quality that made stopping him exceptionally difficult: his unpredictability.
Most takers tended to strike the ball across their body; the surest way of generating the most power. Reid was different. He could go with that most common of strikes, or he could attempt the opposite. He had the skill and handling to make one as effective as the other.
And yet, O’Connor, working closely with Galway’s starting goalkeeper James Skehill, reckoned they had done enough to give Skehill a fighting chance if a penalty was awarded.
“We had predicted where TJ was going to strike it,” O’Connor tells The 42. “He’s not going to put it to the ‘keeper’s left because Skehill has such a wide wing-span, so he’s going to his right.
“And he’s not going to put it high, he’ll put it low because Skehill is such a big man.”
With Galway leading Kilkenny by eight points on the cusp of half-time in Salthill, a penalty against the hosts was awarded. Reid stepped up to the sliotar, took four steps before rising the ball and burying it low to the goalkeeper’s right.
“We predicted exactly where he was going to put the ball,” O’Connor says, “but TJ still stuck it.”
All the work a goalkeeper can do to improve their game, the penalty retains an ability to leave them looking absolutely powerless.
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As the GAA appeared set to adopt the current one-on-one rule for penalties ahead of the 2015 Congress, the same hurler who has shown such mastery from 20 metres spoke out against the change.
“I think if a forward hits it bang on the goalie has no chance unless the ball hits off him,” Reid told the Irish Independent at the time. “When you strike a ball now it’s going probably 100 miles an hour so if you’re standing in the middle and it goes into the bottom corner, you haven’t a chance.”
True enough, as Reid has shown time and again. Yet, for the first few years of the new rule penalty takers were making hard work of things. From the 2015 championship through to Galway’s All-Ireland win in 2017, the ratio of penalties scored to saved was coming out around 50:50. Although it is difficult to determine why goalkeepers adapted quicker than takers to the absence of two extra bodies on their goal-line, O’Connor puts it down to a reduction in chance.
“Goalkeepers weren’t guessing anymore,” he says.
The balance wasn’t long tipping in the taker’s favour. Heading into the most recent weekend of games, seven penalties had been taken and five of them resulted in goals. One of the misses, Martin Kavanagh’s against Galway, was converted by Jon Nolan on the rebound. The other, suitably enough, came from Reid who’s shot was met with a sensational save by Antrim’s Tiernan Smyth.
If goalkeepers had things sussed at first, the advantage now seems to rest more firmly with the takers, as Reid predicted. No more than the way in which free-taking has become almost an exercise in reducing one’s misses to the barest amount, the awarding of a penalty at inter-county level can give an umpire cause to reach for the green flag right away.
“If the striker of the ball is getting better,” reasons O’Connor, “there’s not a whole lot a goalkeeper can do. You’re talking about the blink of an eye here.”
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The blink of an eye is hardly an overstatement.
Writing about Roger Federer’s preternatural ability as a tennis player, David Foster Wallace memorably considered the incredible notion of what goes on between a 130 mph. first serve and a successful return of said serve.
“Since it’s 78 feet from [their] baseline to yours,” he wrote, “that means it takes 0.41 seconds for his serve to reach you. This is less than the time it takes to blink quickly, twice.”
A heavier sliotar will travel slower than that tennis ball on average, but the gap between taker and keeper is shorter, and the window at which to aim at is greater. “The upshot is that pro tennis involves intervals of time too brief for deliberate action,” continued Wallace. “Temporally, we’re more in the operative range of reflexes, purely physical reactions that bypass conscious thought.”
The former Limerick goalkeeper Barry Hennessy has stood before his share of penalties and “conscious thought” is not something he recalls experiencing in the moment that the ball has been hit.
“It just comes back to the fundamentals of goalkeeping: keep your eye on the ball,” he explains to The 42. “The more you think about all these things around it, the more you’re going to throw yourself off balance. Just keep your eyes on the ball as best you can.”
The reality with penalties in hurling is that there is very little external expectation on the goalkeeper. When Shane Bennett scored his second penalty of the championship against Tipperary, it was hit with such power and precision that the sliotar had crossed the line before Barry Hogan’s right knee had touched the ground beneath him. Had Bennett told him exactly where the ball was going to go, it would still have required an extraordinary leap to Hogan’s left side for him to have any chance of stopping it.
It is, in all reality, something of a rigged contest in the taker’s favour. He shouldn’t miss.
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The lack of external expectation does not turn the penalty into a shot to nothing for the ’keeper, however. Three points are at stake. Of the 15 provincial games played so far this year, three points either way would have been enough to change the outcome in nine of them.
Given that goalkeepers have a chance to help their team through saving a penalty, it seems sensible to assume that they may be adversely impacted when a penalty is scored on them. Factor in the increasingly central role hurling ‘keepers have in matches as a whole, they must not only take part in a one-on-one match-up where the odds are stacked against them, but also be capable of immediately forgetting about it.
Four minutes hadn’t been played when Bennett’s penalty left Hogan looking hopelessly over his left shoulder, but by half-time in that match he had been called upon to restart play with a puck-out every two minutes on average. It might not be the kind of physical workload that outfield players are required to take on, but it is psychologically draining.
“Your goalkeeper might not be the best of craic even on the night out after a win,” says Hennessy, “you’re just sitting there with tumbleweed going through your head.
“It is just such a pivotal role now that you continually have to move on from any set-back. You can’t ever put yourself before the group and feel sorry for yourself.”
Although Hennessy spent much of his inter-county career with Limerick as Nickie Quaid’s number two, his club career with Kilmallock brought him as far as an All-Ireland club final against Ballyhale Shamrocks in 2014.
He has found that maturity is the most valuable asset for a goalkeeper, and finding a routine to help you regain your focus when set-backs inevitably occur.
“For me, I walk to the edge of my box and step over the line,” he says. “Once I do that then, the moment is done, there’s no feeling sorry for yourself.
“That was a routine for me to get back into my routine.”
Impressed with what the likes of Quaid, Kilkenny’s Eoin Murphy and Dublin’s Seán Brennan routinely demonstrate in terms of their reflex saves, it is still the bread and butter of a goalkeeper’s distribution that will overwhelmingly dictate how they are assessed.
He has long since come to accept that what penalties present by way of opportunity or inevitability for a goalkeeper are best met with the same outlook: where’s the next ball going?
As far as any goalkeeper is ultimately concerned, Christy O’Connor’s reading of the penalty confirms that the ’keeper’s fate tends to be in the taker’s hands: “At the end of the day, there’s no substitute for power.”