Tompkins blast for ‘sickening to watch’ football
Club game showing up county scene, says former Cork and Kildare hero
LARRY TOMPKINS has described much of modern-day inter-county football as “sickening to watch”, while also rapidly eroding the skills of the game.
The All-Ireland winning former Cork captain, who made his senior inter-county debut with his native Kildare at the age of 16, says that even Kerry and Dublin – renowned for their sense of adventure – have been sucked into a defensive approach.
“Maybe not all the time, but we saw it in the All-Ireland final. When you see Kerry doing it, you know things have changed. Dublin got caught with a few sucker punches against Donegal last year, so they changed their approach too. Both felt it was they way they had to go,” said Tompkins.
He gauges the wider public mood among the customers watching games in his pub on Cork’s Lavitt’s Quay and has found a growing sense of disenchantment.
“Compare most of the county games we saw this year with last Sunday’s Ballyboden-Portlaoise Leinster club final, or the Corofin-Castlebar Connacht final a few weeks ago.
“The club games were great to watch. It was mostly football as it should be played, as opposed to the county game, which has squeezed out a lot of the skills,” he said.
Tompkins believes that a few simple changes would make a significant difference, including kick-outs having to pass the 45-metre line, a ban on back-passing to the goalkeeper, and insisting that only frees kicked off the ground can yield scores. He would also ban goalkeepers from taking scoreable frees.
“What does it say about where the game has gone when goalkeepers are used for long-range scoring attempts from frees? Why can’t outfield players kick the ball properly off the ground?
“If all attempts for scores from frees had to be taken off the ground – as used to be the case – outfield players would work on it and there would be no need to call up goalkeepers,” he said.
CONSIDERATION
Requiring kick-outs to pass the 45-metre line and allowing a player who makes a high catch to call a ‘mark’ is back under consideration, and Tompkins believes it should be introduced immediately.
“The benefits are obvious. People were saying it worked great in the International Rules game a few weeks ago. You wouldn’t need to be a genius to know that it would be the same in our own game,” he said,
“As for banning passing back to the goalkeeper, it might look like a small thing but it would have a real impact.”
Tompkins, who managed Cork for seven years after his playing days, is not enamoured with the proposal to scrap the All-Ireland U-21 championship, questioning why it’s necessary.
“The U-21 is run off quickly before the senior starts. It’s a good competition in its own right and is a great way of finding out if a player has the potential to make the senior grade.”
He does not accept the argument that players are suffering from burnout, arising from college and U-21 games early in the year.
“If there’s damage being done, it’s not caused by the games but by the training. In that case, the answer is simple: cut back on training. There’s too much collective training going on anyway.”
Tompkins has wide experience of the demands imposed on talented youngsters from his days with Kildare, having played minor, U-21 and senior for two years, and then U-21 and senior for five years.
“Lads want to play games, whatever
the competition. So if there’s a problem with burnout, don’t drop the competition, curb the training,” he said.
Tompkins accepts that club players are frustrated by the haphazard nature of the fixtures schedule but believes it could be addressed quite easily.
WAITING
“You have clubs playing one championship game in April and then waiting maybe three of four months for the next one. I’d scrap the back door in county championships. But if you do that, the league needs to be made more relevant to the championship.
“That could be done by running the club leagues off before the championship and seeding teams for the draw, according to where they finished in the league. Then have a straight knock-out championship, which would be much easier to run,” he said.
He queries why counties make championship draws in December/ January and believes that if the leagues were used to decide seeding for the premier competition, it would be a boost for the club scene.
“Why is there a need for a club to know who they are playing in the championship until a week or two before the game? I’m convinced that it wouldn’t take that much to improve the lot of club players if everyone put their minds to it,” he said.
He supports Paraic Duffy’s proposal to limit county squad sizes for Allianz League games so as to have more players available for club duty. However, he says it doesn’t go far enough (Duffy wants it restricted to 26).
“Why not 22? Only six subs can be brought on so even with 22, one player has no chance of getting a run. You can have anything up to 30 players travelling for league games and nine of them can’t get a game. It makes no sense, when they could instead play for their club that weekend,” he said.