IT WAS CHRISSY MCKAIGUE who stood up on day two of the National League and let us have it.
By ‘us’, I mean the badly-dressed, somewhat portly mouth-breathing members of the fourth estate of GAA journalism present for Kerry’s smash and grab win over Derry in Celtic Park. He wanted to know which of us were going ‘to call it out’ in the press box long after the game.
With the veins on our temples throbbing with the stress of deadlines, he got a muffled response, before he started a more direct campaign on Cahair O’Kane of The Irish News, a goalkeeper by trade.
O’Kane stood up his man. He rendered McKaigue scoreless from play. Both parties left the debate feeling they had delivered their bit.
But at the time, McKaigue was a voice in the wilderness. One of, well, more or less, one.
He’s not so easily dismissed now, after a weekend in which the balance seems to have veered from sunny optimism from managers into outright criticism of Jim Gavin’s Blakeian post-modern vision of Gaelic football.
McKaigue might have been an early adapter. In his mind, the new rules are anti-coaching. An example he used is the lack of a short kickout and the puzzle thereafter of breaking through a high press from the opposition.
It was felt that a lot of this stuff would evolve as the league has gone on. And as we witnessed in the Athletic Grounds on Saturday night, Ethan Rafferty has mastered kicking across his body to a player in the right corner-back position. And after that, the Armagh players backed themselves to get up the field and create an overlap.
Others have joined McKaigue. Others, such as Kieran McGeeney, Robbie Brennan – especially Robbie Brennan – Malachy O’Rourke, Jim McGuinness and Padraic Joyce have felt sufficient time has elapsed and enough evidence has been compiled for them to shoot down certain rules like carnival ducks.
A brief observation at this point. Anyone who has ever sat in a GAA committee will be aware that within that group, there will be some who are more invested in the process than others.
There are some that will lead conversations, steering them around to arrive at a destination of their choosing.
Likewise, there are others who are part of the committee because they didn’t feel they could say no to the person asking. Or those who say yes initially, but find that with all their other commitments, they bit off more than they could chew.
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From the original dozen members of the Football Review Committee, I’m going to guess that at least three or four of them were walking out of some of the meetings thinking that others in that room were half-mad and that it would never work.
Committees being what they are, many good ideas were hatched. And some haven’t coped with the road-testing.
At the very start, the GAA-watching population were so beaten down by a game that had become so formulaic that they were willing to accept anything, no matter how radical, to get away from the fact that Gaelic football had become as engaging as watching two strangers play Connect Four. With no drink.
Ciaran Kilkenny and Connaire Mackin compete for a high ball. Leah Scholes / INPHO
Leah Scholes / INPHO / INPHO
In fairness, the arguments have been focussed on the elements that have emerged that they feel are unsustainable, such as:
• The lack of an advantage a team has now for keeping all their players on the pitch.
• The 20-second guideline for kickouts that went so horribly wrong at the weekend between Armagh and Dublin.
• The 2-point free.
• How the defensive set-up for every team has now become 11 behind the ball, with the two-point arc used as a marker whereas before it was the 45-metre line.
By and large, there has been a warm welcome for the elements that speed up the game, such as:
• The solo and go.
And . . . That’s it.
Now, there are issues with some rules.
Some clearly need to be changed or altered in time for the championship.
Others are a roaring success. The 50-metre penalty for dissent cuts out the undignified whinging. Watch out for this one though, as referees have become lax on it in the last two rounds.
The penalty for some offences are extreme, especially around the aforementioned 20-second kickout rule where the opposition gets a tap-over free.
And yet, that very rule has created a brilliant drama whereby the team doing the scoring has the chance to get a serious momentum surge without the various methods of cheating employed to slow down a game. A shot-clock device in the stadium would cure this. And I don’t want to hear any excuses.
But what’s not to like about a kickout being hung up in the air?
Now, it’s a battle that is contested between players that have never been as athletically honed in the history of Gaelic football. Imagine all those hours spent in gyms, rigorous testing, vertical jumps, box-jumps, squatting 180kg and single-figure body fat scores, only to watch a corner back pick up a short kickout?
It remains a huge embarrassment to the potential beauty of Gaelic football that, from 2019, Brian Fenton caught fewer – FEWER – than a single kickout per game. What a waste. Now we can see the likes of Aidan O’Shea climb the skies when a game is there to be won.
But, let the public have a voice. In the interests of journalism, your correspondent here really put his back out by sending a generic What’s App message to 25 people on my phone, canvassing them with the one simple question: ‘Are you enjoying Gaelic football more in 2025, than 2024?’
Among that number are current county players, retired county players, former and current county managers, club managers and coaches, and the average punter who goes along to matches.
Four didn’t answer. I’d imagine they saw my name coming up on their phone, rolled their eyes and muttered inwardly, ‘I don’t have time for this shit.’
But here’s a flavour of the responses,
1. Excitement higher but frustration higher too.
2. Overall I would say yes, a few adjustments needed.
3. A more enjoyable game because there’s always the chance of a comeback.
4. I think it needs the obvious tweaks, but in general I feel the games are better.
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5. Yes. Are you looking a binary answer? I’m doing my column on it this week, will see what I have left over for ya after.
6. It’s still too hard to tell in my opinion.
7. 100% better. Far more exciting . . . momentum is absolutely massive. Overall it’s top-class in comparison.
8. Nu fone, who dis?
9. 100% it’s definitely more exciting to watch.
10. My enjoyment is mixed. I spend a lot of time explaining the rules to people around me.
11. INFINITELY better. I’m no longer looking at my phone during games which is no scientific or a metric, but it’s something!
Look, you get the flavour. Out of the 21 responses, most came with a caveat or two. But nobody said they wanted to go back to the 2024 version of Gaelic football. Only one was agnostic on the issue.
It’s not to the liking to the detail obsessed managers. For years there has been a narrative that this group of people were the embodiment and encapsulation of philosophy, elite high-performance holders of certain secrets that would blow your mind if you only knew 5% of them.
Rather than just some middle-aged lads in skinny tracksuit bottoms putting 15 men behind a ball and puking the opposition.
So. We, the ordinary 5/8s, the thrill-seekers, the day-trippers, the pint bottle of Bulmers in a glass of ice and ten Benson, the burger on the way up the hill, all of us, we have our game wrestled back from THEM; the white coat, clipboard wielding craic vacuums.
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Gaelic football is a game worth saving from itself and control freaks
LAST UPDATE | 3 Mar
IT WAS CHRISSY MCKAIGUE who stood up on day two of the National League and let us have it.
By ‘us’, I mean the badly-dressed, somewhat portly mouth-breathing members of the fourth estate of GAA journalism present for Kerry’s smash and grab win over Derry in Celtic Park. He wanted to know which of us were going ‘to call it out’ in the press box long after the game.
With the veins on our temples throbbing with the stress of deadlines, he got a muffled response, before he started a more direct campaign on Cahair O’Kane of The Irish News, a goalkeeper by trade.
O’Kane stood up his man. He rendered McKaigue scoreless from play. Both parties left the debate feeling they had delivered their bit.
But at the time, McKaigue was a voice in the wilderness. One of, well, more or less, one.
He’s not so easily dismissed now, after a weekend in which the balance seems to have veered from sunny optimism from managers into outright criticism of Jim Gavin’s Blakeian post-modern vision of Gaelic football.
McKaigue might have been an early adapter. In his mind, the new rules are anti-coaching. An example he used is the lack of a short kickout and the puzzle thereafter of breaking through a high press from the opposition.
It was felt that a lot of this stuff would evolve as the league has gone on. And as we witnessed in the Athletic Grounds on Saturday night, Ethan Rafferty has mastered kicking across his body to a player in the right corner-back position. And after that, the Armagh players backed themselves to get up the field and create an overlap.
Others have joined McKaigue. Others, such as Kieran McGeeney, Robbie Brennan – especially Robbie Brennan – Malachy O’Rourke, Jim McGuinness and Padraic Joyce have felt sufficient time has elapsed and enough evidence has been compiled for them to shoot down certain rules like carnival ducks.
A brief observation at this point. Anyone who has ever sat in a GAA committee will be aware that within that group, there will be some who are more invested in the process than others.
There are some that will lead conversations, steering them around to arrive at a destination of their choosing.
Likewise, there are others who are part of the committee because they didn’t feel they could say no to the person asking. Or those who say yes initially, but find that with all their other commitments, they bit off more than they could chew.
From the original dozen members of the Football Review Committee, I’m going to guess that at least three or four of them were walking out of some of the meetings thinking that others in that room were half-mad and that it would never work.
Committees being what they are, many good ideas were hatched. And some haven’t coped with the road-testing.
At the very start, the GAA-watching population were so beaten down by a game that had become so formulaic that they were willing to accept anything, no matter how radical, to get away from the fact that Gaelic football had become as engaging as watching two strangers play Connect Four. With no drink.
In fairness, the arguments have been focussed on the elements that have emerged that they feel are unsustainable, such as:
• The lack of an advantage a team has now for keeping all their players on the pitch.
• The 20-second guideline for kickouts that went so horribly wrong at the weekend between Armagh and Dublin.
• The 2-point free.
• How the defensive set-up for every team has now become 11 behind the ball, with the two-point arc used as a marker whereas before it was the 45-metre line.
By and large, there has been a warm welcome for the elements that speed up the game, such as:
• The solo and go.
And . . . That’s it.
Now, there are issues with some rules.
Some clearly need to be changed or altered in time for the championship.
Others are a roaring success. The 50-metre penalty for dissent cuts out the undignified whinging. Watch out for this one though, as referees have become lax on it in the last two rounds.
The penalty for some offences are extreme, especially around the aforementioned 20-second kickout rule where the opposition gets a tap-over free.
And yet, that very rule has created a brilliant drama whereby the team doing the scoring has the chance to get a serious momentum surge without the various methods of cheating employed to slow down a game. A shot-clock device in the stadium would cure this. And I don’t want to hear any excuses.
Now, it’s a battle that is contested between players that have never been as athletically honed in the history of Gaelic football. Imagine all those hours spent in gyms, rigorous testing, vertical jumps, box-jumps, squatting 180kg and single-figure body fat scores, only to watch a corner back pick up a short kickout?
It remains a huge embarrassment to the potential beauty of Gaelic football that, from 2019, Brian Fenton caught fewer – FEWER – than a single kickout per game. What a waste. Now we can see the likes of Aidan O’Shea climb the skies when a game is there to be won.
But, let the public have a voice. In the interests of journalism, your correspondent here really put his back out by sending a generic What’s App message to 25 people on my phone, canvassing them with the one simple question: ‘Are you enjoying Gaelic football more in 2025, than 2024?’
Among that number are current county players, retired county players, former and current county managers, club managers and coaches, and the average punter who goes along to matches.
Four didn’t answer. I’d imagine they saw my name coming up on their phone, rolled their eyes and muttered inwardly, ‘I don’t have time for this shit.’
But here’s a flavour of the responses,
1. Excitement higher but frustration higher too.
2. Overall I would say yes, a few adjustments needed.
3. A more enjoyable game because there’s always the chance of a comeback.
4. I think it needs the obvious tweaks, but in general I feel the games are better.
5. Yes. Are you looking a binary answer? I’m doing my column on it this week, will see what I have left over for ya after.
6. It’s still too hard to tell in my opinion.
7. 100% better. Far more exciting . . . momentum is absolutely massive. Overall it’s top-class in comparison.
8. Nu fone, who dis?
9. 100% it’s definitely more exciting to watch.
10. My enjoyment is mixed. I spend a lot of time explaining the rules to people around me.
11. INFINITELY better. I’m no longer looking at my phone during games which is no scientific or a metric, but it’s something!
Look, you get the flavour. Out of the 21 responses, most came with a caveat or two. But nobody said they wanted to go back to the 2024 version of Gaelic football. Only one was agnostic on the issue.
It’s not to the liking to the detail obsessed managers. For years there has been a narrative that this group of people were the embodiment and encapsulation of philosophy, elite high-performance holders of certain secrets that would blow your mind if you only knew 5% of them.
Rather than just some middle-aged lads in skinny tracksuit bottoms putting 15 men behind a ball and puking the opposition.
So. We, the ordinary 5/8s, the thrill-seekers, the day-trippers, the pint bottle of Bulmers in a glass of ice and ten Benson, the burger on the way up the hill, all of us, we have our game wrestled back from THEM; the white coat, clipboard wielding craic vacuums.
And it feels goooooood. Here comes summer!
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All-Ireland Ladies Gaelic Football column GAA New Rules