I
Gaelic football is always at a crossroads.
Be it rule changes or championship restructures, Dublin’s dominance or the deployment of a sweeper, diving or the deficiencies in television coverage, it rarely feels as if the game is headed in an agreeable direction.
It’s admirable in its own way that Gaelic football allows for such introspection. Yet, there’s a certain futility to it. The Gaelic football community is not a unanimous collection of the like-minded. One group’s idea of salvation is damnation for another.
Although the divergences in thought cannot be adequately paired into two groups (there’s far too much to disagree about), the opening two weeks of this year’s championship have provided a neat opportunity to explore the two broadest opinions.
For whatever else comes and goes, Gaelic football has its optimists and pessimists.
II
From Sunday evening’s Twitter scrolling to Monday morning’s office discussions, Monaghan’s dramatic defeat of Tyrone was generally regarded as a great game of football. Why so many took so much enjoyment from it is more complicated, however.
Some saw it as a shot in the arm that this nascent championship desperately required; a spectacular break from the drudgery of last weekend. Others witnessed a match that demonstrated the great versatility of Gaelic football. It may have surpassed Roscommon’s defeat of Mayo in terms of the quality of play, but this only served to highlight how many ways there are to win a game.
In this unparalleled era of Gaelic football coverage, in the aftermath of last weekend’s clash in Castlebar we caught a clear view of both opposing outlooks:
Roscommon were the Atletico Madrid of the GAA . . . it was a brilliant, brilliant performance from them.
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Paddy Andrews, The Football Pod
Is this what Gaelic football has become – a ball-retention exercise where there are few contests for possession? Massed forces closing down space and trying to force an error?
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Martin Breheny, Irish Independent
Imagine waking up on Monday morning as a Roscommon player. The best of times. Sunday was near perfect for Roscommon in terms of their tactical preparations and in terms of their mentality.
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Jim McGuinness, Irish Times
I’ve covered a lot of Roscommon this year and I don’t think one game they’ve been involved in has been a great game, and I think they love that.
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Maurice Brosnan, The Gaelic Football Show
In a time where managers and coaches are told to work and act in such a way, it’s great to see someone as refreshing as [Davy Burke] on a side-line that actually wears his bloody heart on his sleeve.
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Shane Curran, The GAA Hour
If you’re playing against a team like Roscommon, just expect the worst and play from there . . . It’s a bit of a shift from Roscommon teams now over the last four, five years.
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Oisin McConville, The GAA Social
III
The coverage of Gaelic football in recent seasons has been significantly improved by the proliferation of new voices speaking from points of genuine interest and authority. Although a wider forum could as easily have diluted what worthwhile commentary existed, the opposite has occurred.
There is little tolerance for chancers when so many other avenues of interest are open to followers of Gaelic football.
With this in mind, none of the above should be regarded as a definitive assessment of what these particular pundits think about Gaelic football generally, rather it is an expert reflection of their thoughts on one particular game (albeit in some situations a broader assessment of Gaelic football too).
Paddy Andrews found cause to celebrate Roscommon’s performance, likening their doggedness to an outlook Diego Simeone cultivated while turning Atletico Madrid into one of Europe’s best club teams.
Others would regard Roscommon’s performance with the disdain Jurgen Klopp reserved for Simeone’s team in 2020: “I don’t understand with the quality they have to be honest that they play this kind of football . . . They could play proper football.”
Neither outlook is necessarily wrong.
It is admirable to want Gaelic football at inter-county level played along the exciting lines Monaghan and Tyrone opted for on Sunday afternoon. And if Mayo had their way the weekend before, they would certainly have preferred a more open contest.
It was predictable then that for all Roscommon’s win was celebrated as success for a relative underdog, the manner of their achievement left some onlookers feeling cold.
“[Enda] Smith was excellent last Sunday,” noted Martin Breheny, one of the most vociferous critics of the game as a whole. “Still, he’s restricted by the demands of the modern game, which prioritise robotic systems and structures above all else.”
The carefully executed plan of a sophisticated management team with hugely capable players, or a lesser form of Gaelic football. It was open to interpretation.
IV
In such a situation, which group are the optimists, and which are the pessimists?
The belief that Gaelic football can more routinely resemble Monaghan’s clash with Tyrone is as optimistic as the celebration of Roscommon’s “robotic system” for its supposed tactical sophistication is pessimistic. Is that really all that Gaelic football should strive to be?
And yet, on the same weekend that New York defeated Leitrim and Clare got the better of Cork in an horrific run of games for the status quo, to give Roscommon their dues for out-thinking, out-working and out-playing Mayo on their own patch would be a glowing endorsement of what can be achieved by counties less certain of their footing on Gaelic football’s hierarchy.
From that perspective, only the most pessimistic of onlookers could see what Roscommon had done and complain about the way they did it.
V
Donegal at the minute with the media is a thing that you can poke fun at. You can eulogise about Kerry and maybe talk about Dublin, the perennial chokers, and then Donegal just poke fun at them. That’s not us and we’re not happy with that. But we have a job to do and we’re going to continue to do that job. Regardless of what’s said, we will continue to do that job.
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Jim McGuinness, speaking in 2011
VI
Of course, beyond the ideological groups that Gaelic football cultivates and media figures attach themselves to, there is a loyalty above all else among supporters to their own county.
As swathes of onlookers lamented what they perceived as Jim McGuinness’ assault on the sport across the last decade, a healthy majority of counties would nevertheless have given anything for someone to achieve with their team what he was achieving with Donegal.
Although I too found it almost comical at times the lengths Donegal’s players went to in figuring out McGuinness’ vision, he was vindicated in the only way most people really care about: Jimmy won matches, Jimmy won an All-Ireland.
And yet, in an era when inter-county Gaelic football is more readily available to watch than ever, a significant portion of people cannot wait to tell you how unwatchable it has become.
Yes, the latter stages of the championship (and the odd game like Monaghan vs Tyrone) throws up some unforgettable games, but why can’t this be replicated right across the competition? I would think the more pertinent question is why people think that it should.
Davy Burke’s Roscommon might not replicate what McGuinness achieved with Donegal, but what is the alternative to their disciplined – and up until now – successful gameplan? Although as a viewer I am occasionally torn between exciting Gaelic football and that which is effective, there is a certain predictability to the former that the latter never demonstrates.
Between them, Kerry (38) and Dublin (30) have won more All-Ireland titles than all other counties combined. More often than not, they have the best players and play the best football. In the great tradition of GAA disrupters, a figure like McGuinness took one of the country’s relatively less successful counties and turned Gaelic football on its head.
He may have annoyed a lot of people in doing so, but when the force of Gaelic football’s historical hierarchy is firmly at odds with what you want to achieve, why on earth would you play to the strengths of those that are already strongest?
Roscommon’s defeat of Mayo might not necessarily endear many neutrals to make time for their Connacht semi-final with Galway this Sunday, but popularity is no more likely to win you a game than apathy.
And when this Roscommon team are likely watching yet another Kerry and Dublin All-Ireland final later this year, at least they’ll know that they didn’t simply do what was expected of them and get out of the way quietly.
Somewhere between the optimists and the pessimists, Gaelic football desperately needs those realists who see the game for what it is and search for ways to upend it in their favour.
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