Football must take its lead from hurling and embrace change

Embracing new ways is a must in football

SO extensive was the change that swept hurling in 2018 that it left the sport looking more radical than football.

This really was amazing, given there is no game more devoted to its myths and legends than hurling.

This is a sport, after all, where enthusiasts are often left frustrated by a referee applying the rules.

Liam Sheedy is regarded as one of the most progressive and interesting managers of this era, and his return to the Tipperary sideline will elevate the 2019 season.

This time four years ago, the Hurling 2020 committee — of which Sheedy was chair — published a report on improving the game.

At its launch, Sheedy made the astonishing statement that ‘We’re delighted that we don’t have cynical fouling in hurling’.

Even more remarkable was that a claim so broad and so plainly contestable was met with general agreement.

Hurling’s governing attitude could be summed up in four words: leave well enough alone. But everything changes.

And 2018 was celebrated as one of the most exhilarating seasons in living memory because there was a large enough constituency willing to accept change. The knockout provincial system was overhauled, and a roundrobin structure revitalised Leinster and especially Munster. Now it is football’s turn. The experimental rules have been peppered with hostility from managers. And there is no guarantee that all of the proposals for improving the game will work.

But to argue, as Kevin Walsh of Galway tried to do last week, that the changes are little more than a reaction to voluble punditry is ridiculous.

As was pointed out last November by David Hassan, the chair of the standing committee on the playing rules, their ideas were not magicked out of the ether.

They studied matches going back to 2011 sourcing evidence to support their work, and they have the data to back up their attitude to the proliferation of handpasses in football, for instance.

Walsh has not been the only voice of resistance. James Horan, who has returned to the Mayo dugout, called the plans ‘crazy’.

But Horan watched in Carrickon-Shannon on Sunday as his team won a match against Leitrim in a manner that indicated a willingness among the GAA public to give change a chance.

Penalty shootouts are not part of the experimental rules, of course, but a crowd in excess of 3,000 on a bleak January Sunday were entertained by this way of deciding a pre-season match that will otherwise be largely forgotten come the thundering business of summer.

It showed that fans, the truly committed kind that devote their first Sunday of a new year to watching unfamiliar faces represent their counties, can accept the idea of change with enthusiasm.

The Connacht Council relied on penalties rather than extra-time because the latter option can be so easily compromised by failing light at this time of the year.

But so positive was the reaction, both at Páirc Seán Mac Diarmada and in the coverage since, that the GAA authorities have indicated it is a method of deciding matches that could eventually be used in the Championship.

‘We are heading in that direction anyway,’ Feargal McGill, director of games administration in the GAA, said yesterday.

‘If anything it has given us some vision of what a penalty kick or penalty puck competition might look like, which is actually quite helpful in developing regulations around it.’

This could all prove too much for those clutching their pearls at the prospect of limiting hand-passes or the use of a sin-bin, but it is actually hugely encouraging.

Football is too often reduced to dullness by reactive tactics and the desire of teams to avoid losing rather than aggressively pursuing a win.

Managers deserve some understanding in this regard. Their concerns are necessarily short-term ones. They, properly, feel dutybound to do what is best for their county.

And it has become grindingly clear over the past decade that the self-interest of managers and their teams does not encourage an exciting spectacle for everyone else.

So while managers and players need to influence any changes in

“Concerns about

football go beyond the TV studio”

the game, they cannot block and veto and obstruct.

FOOTBALL needs to change. ‘It was very exciting. It was announced there was a penalty shootout and to see them (children) stampede to the back of the goal was worth having it alone,’ Connacht Council secretary John Prenty told Morning

Ireland yesterday. Footage of the penalties and the roars that greeted Mayo’s final successful conversion by Evan Regan has also been widely viewed. Pre-season competitions do not ordinarily attract attention of this type.

And if there was to be a story in the football warm-up tournaments this month, one expected it to centre on the gripes of managers about the rules experiments.

Instead, a tantalising view of the excitement that is possible broke through the January gloaming.

Penalties alone will not transform football, but transformation is required.

Resisting change is to be expected from managers, but that does not mean their complaints should be repeated unchallenged, or that the desire for change must be interred beneath their unhappiness.

Hurling was able to embrace it, and football must as well.

The debate needs to be disassociated from particular pundits, too. Predictably, there are some only too happy to try and make this a crusade, but concerns about the shape of modern football extend way beyond TV studios.

This is not about Dublin’s dominance, either; they are one of the most refreshing sides in living memory, and their meetings with Mayo and Kerry have been responsible for most of the great matches of the past five years.

But the possibility of a good match or two in August or September is not good enough.

Change must come, and the public are ready for it.

A football pitch in Leitrim last Sunday provided evidence of that.