It’s still not pretty but Gallagher’s plan a lifeline for Fermanagh
Gallagher’s system is lifeline for Ernesiders
IF the novelty of Rory Gallagher facing Donegal has worn thin in the aftermath of last summer’s Ulster final, the blanket he weaves remains as thick as ever.
Fermanagh travel to Letterkenny on Sunday as the surprise frontrunners in Division 2, but less surprising is that their bright start has been built on a miserly concession rate.
After three rounds, Gallagher’s team have given up 19 scores at a cost of 25 points, which works out at an average of eight points per game.
Taking a rough — and somewhat conservative — average of 75 minutes per game, Fermanagh are giving up one score every 12 minutes and three scores every half of football.
Given the modest sample size those figures could be dismissed as a freak except that Gallagher has form for schooling teams in the art of mass defence.
Last year, he inherited from Pete McGrath a Fermanagh team who had been relegated to the Allianz League’s third tier having conceded more goals than anyone else (12) while posting the sixth worst defensive numbers in the entire League.
Under Gallagher Fermanagh returned to Division 2 boasting the best defensive record in the entire League. They conceded 78 points in Division 3 last year. Laois conceded three points fewer but also played one game less.
In three out of seven games, they conceded 10 points or less while they only conceded more than 10 scores in two games.
Impressively, when it came to games that really mattered, they knew when to squeeze rivals dry.
They played Armagh three times, losing just the once in a Division 3 final shootout on an untypical 1-16 to 0-17 scoreline.
But in the two games where something rested on the outcome, they kept Armagh to 0-7 on both occasions. Once in drawing the regular round League game and again when beating them in the Championship. Those are quite the flurry of impressive stats and yet that will not stop some beating him over the head with them. His three-year reign as Donegal manager ended with such discontent on the terraces that the thencounty chairman Sean Dunnion labelled the abuse directed at Gallagher on social media as ‘disgusting’ in the aftermath of an All-Ireland qualifier mauling by Galway in 2017. That would be his final game in charge, ending his association with the county he resides in and who in the early noughties feted him as one half of the game’s most celebrated double-acts in delivering the county’s second All-Ireland win alongside Jim McGuinness.
His misfortune, after the acrimonious break-up of that partnership in late 2013, it could be argued, was that he simply outstayed his welcome.
While McGuinness still enjoys messiah-like status in the county, that could have changed had he stayed on beyond 2014 when a bid at winning a second All-Ireland perished on Kerry’s refusal to facilitate the Donegal system.
Instead, it was Gallagher who would get it in the neck. Patience wore thin with the system when it failed to deliver any silverware – back-to-back narrow Ulster final defeats against Monaghan and Tyrone ultimately took a wrecking ball to his reputation as a cuttingedge coach.
However, Gallagher’s secondcoming in Donegal was always going to be more challenging, not least because of the climbing age profile of the group which led to wholesale transition of the team in his final season.
The criticism remained that he was too defensive for his own good and while Donegal’s Ulster success last year under Declan Bonner added weight to that assessment, it is a tad simplistic.
Gallagher, mindful he did not have the players to play a defensive system, changed tack at the start of his final season with Donegal to play to a more orthodox beat, but coughed up 2-17 to Kerry in the opening League game.
Finding a way to make his teams competitive rather than providing some kind of notional vehicle for self-expression has always been his way.
If the price for that is the ‘antifootball’ jibes that often come his way, he will poker face them down.
The current narrative is you can’t win with a blanket zonal-based defence, but it remains a life-line for football’s disenfranchised, such as Carlow and Fermanagh who have both achieved success with a game-plan based on shutting down the opposition.
The criticism is that success with such a game-plan is limited, but limited success for some counties is far better than no success at all.
Given Fermanagh’s size and lack of resources, already this season they have drawn with Cork, the country’s biggest GAA county, and they have beaten a Super 8s team in Kildare.
The notion that they could do that without being married to a gameplan rooted in organisation, hard work and mass defence is fanciful.
They are not in the business of winning All-Irelands but, not least in last year’s journey to a first Ulster final in a decade, they most certainly are in the business of punching above their weight.
And in so doing Gallagher has proved his relevance once more.