The game we love is plunging into Xbox abyss...
IHAVE a Limerick friend who is convinced he is losing his zest for life. He is the best in the world but last summer, when Limerick were flying high, I was close to heading to court to take out an injunction order as I was losing half days in the harvest season to hurling talk.
I ran into him this week and, in the aftermath of Limerick winning the League, I resigned myself to the fact that the rewiring project in the top field would be delayed due to an excessive bout of natter. I need not have worried. ‘Jeez, you are very quiet today after the League final,’ I enquired of him.
‘I don’t know what’s wrong, Tom, but to be honest with you I was half-bored watching it,’ he confessed, with the look of a man who did not know if he was coming or going.
That sense of confusion is a shared one; he is not the only one in my circle of friends who, although they are happy with Limerick’s recent success, are a little underwhelmed by the actual game itself.
The reason for that is hurling is less of a visceral experience these days and more of an Xbox one.
It is no longer the game; it is more like a gaming experience.
You think I am exaggerating? Not only have players got GPS tracking devices stitched into their shirts to gain a scientific measure of their worth, some set-ups, like Limerick, are now using camera drones in training to get an ‘overview’ on it all.
We had an eye in the sky as well in my day but it was more spiritual in nature than technological
There was the odd time when I had to remind players that Mick Mackey deserved better than to be subjected to looking down on a particularly abject display.
Feel free to label me a graduate from hurling’s dark ages but, if so, could you put me in the picture as to how exactly the game has benefited from the GPS print-outs and camera footage from high in the sky?
And if the game has ‘evolved’ — I despise that term because it is assumed to be another word for progress — why are good hurling folk bored watching this better game?
I will make a stab as to why that is the case.
The thrill of watching a warrior sport in the flesh on a battlefield loses a lot of its appeal when it is transported onto a digital chessboard.
I am not bemoaning the fact that we don’t have the quality of players in the modern game; the reality is the complete opposite.
We have never had better players with a higher skill-set — you would have to do some digging through the archives to find a goal as sumptuously executed as Aaron Gillane’s last week — but that makes the dilution of the game’s core qualities an even greater injustice.
Yet, in many ways, that goal summed up the dire straits of the modern game.
It was sourced from a short puck-out to an unmarked cornerback Richie English, who in turn passed to the unmarked Tom Morrissey, who supplied the final pass under no pressure.
Described like that — unmarked pass, unmarked pass, goal — it loses a little in the retelling.
But that sequence of play in the modern game is played 10,000 times over without a Gillane-like finish to sugar it.
Now, put like that, how do you feel watching that? Bored, perhaps? The irony is that Gaelic football, after at least 10 years in which it sacrificed itself as a spectacle on the altar of pragmatism, is beginning to cotton onto the reality that they were sold a pup.
The narrative ahead of the football championship is that the top teams will go for it this summer by ‘pressing up’ on each other.
That is a fancy way of saying that they will go back to marking each other, like the game had always been intended to be played.
And the top teams are doing that not because they care about the aesthetics of their game, but because they know it gives them a better chance of winning.
You win the ball back higher up in your opponents’ side of the field and you have a better chance of scoring as a result.
Imagine, who would ever have thought of that?
Well, apart from some football folk who no doubt argued just that more than a decade ago but who were dismissed then as backwoods men.
As football finally sees the light, hurling embraces the dark.
Every time I hear our smart new coaches — who subsequently turn into pundits where they continue to hype up a sport they have poisoned — tell us that you need to play ‘through the lines’, exploit the ‘fluidity of the middle third’, engage a ‘high press off a low zonal base’ (I made the last one up but they can feel free to use it), I have to fight the urge to relocate their iPad to a place where the sun does not shine.
It is all nonsense, of course, but it is of the kind doing untold damage to a game where strategy and system have displaced substance and style.
There is still a place for tactics in the game but not at the expense of good sense.
I don’t know if the reason they decided it was a good idea in Waterford to stop marking Limerick players was down to a screen grab they took from a drone, but I do know it did not work.
Now, had they instructed a corner-forward to pick up English, Nicky Quaid might have to puck out a ball that would have to be contested and won.
Waterford might even have got the ball back and if they didn’t, the chances are they would still not have conceded that goal.
And, above all, those watching would have seen a contest which would have lifted their hearts and loosened their tongues.