FOOTBALL REVIEW Committee member James Horan says he would be ‘cursing’ those who axed the pre-season competitions if he was still an inter-county manager.
The former Mayo manager, who guided his county to four All-Ireland finals in two different stints as boss, is part of Jim Gavin’s 12-strong FRC.
The committee has presented an interim report which contains 50 different proposals, or ‘rules enhancements’, as well as a number of recommendations, all of which they believe will make the game more enjoyable to watch and play.
The proposals, containing seven ‘core rules enhancements’, will be showcased during next weekend’s interprovincial tournament at Croke Park before being put before Central Council on 26 October and then, potentially, a Special Congress on 30 November.
The next step after that, presuming the suite of rules gets the green light, would be to bring them into temporary effect from January 1 for club and county competitions in 2025.
The pre-season competitions that normally take place in January would have been a useful vehicle for county teams to road test any new rules in a competitive environment before the National Leagues but the GAA, with the backing of the GPA, opted to suspend those competitions for a year.
Asked if he reckons county managers are secretly cursing the FRC for tinkering with rules again, Horan shook his head.
“I’d be cursing who got rid of the pre-season competitions this year,” he said. “That’s who I’d be cursing this year. Because we were talking to John Cleary (Cork manager) on Monday. He can’t start training until 7 December. He can’t have any challenges. He has no pre-season competition. He’ll have all his college guys gone in January playing third level, and in December, after the club season, you’ll have a lot of guys that have gone on holidays.
“So he’s going to get a couple of sessions, I’d say, with all his team playing before the National League starts. That’s awful tough on an inter-county manager. If I was an inter-county manager, I’d definitely be giving out to someone about something. It’s too short. I think the FBD League in Connacht would have been perfect for it this year, of all years.”
Horan said it’s probably too late now to bring back the pre-season competitions but queried if some form of competition or series of games could be arranged, given the circumstances.
“I think it would be great if there was something, whether you could play challenges earlier in December, or if there was something there,” he said.
“I don’t know if you could get the provincial competitions back at this stage but if there was something to allow an inter-county manager to get ready, particularly for this year, because you’re going to have relegation in the league. There’s going to be two teams relegated.”
Despite his concerns, Horan stopped short of predicting a chaotic first few weeks in the National League.
Teams will have the added pressure of fighting for their Sam Maguire Cup status in some cases but Horan backed players to make the best of it.
“A lot of those players are awful smart,” he said. “They pick these things up very, very quickly. I think you’ll see a pretty good version of it fairly quickly, which hopefully will sell it and people will see the benefits of it, along with the Railway Cup next weekend.”
One fear expressed at yesterday’s FRC briefing was that it’s too much change at the one time. From the proposed new scoring system to the new scoring arc on the pitch to restrictions on where players can move on the pitch to how referees deal with issues like dissent, it could be a major overhaul.
Horan said the evidence from the seven sandbox, or trial, games which took place between early June and last Saturday, when Cavan hosted Kildare, is that we have nothing to fear.
“Kildare played Cavan last weekend and that was the highest-profile game we played,” he said. “There were probably seven or eight senior inter-county players in each team. It was like a normal game.
“It was like a game from 15 years ago. Not all of the rules are involved in every phase of the game. Like, for the first three-quarters of that game, there was no solo-and-go, there was no two-point shot.
“The only two rules that were there the whole time, and you don’t even notice them because they’re constant, are the goalkeeper (restriction) and the three up. They were the only two. Everything else was like it wasn’t there.
“So in one way, I don’t know if there’ll be as much chaos as it sounds like when you listen to people, or when you see a big 200-page book. You think, ‘Jesus Christ’ and all of this. But I don’t think it’ll manifest that way at all.”
The FRC released a 204-page interim report yesterday to coincide with the launch though much of it was explanatory pictures and data collected during the research phase.
One unknown for the FRC is exactly how fit players will need to be to keep up with the new faster, more dynamic game. With quicker restarts will come fewer rest periods.
It’s understood that the upcoming interprovincial tournament at Croke Park will be broken into four 15-minute periods partly for this reason. The FRC is also investigating how roll-on, roll-off subs could work.
