ANY ANALYSIS OF THE PAST MUST TAKE PLACE THROUGH THE LENS OF RELATIVITY
CAST YOUR mind back to the early 1990s and the first mobile phone model to hit the market. It had all the subtlety of a bale of briquettes, the only distinction being the pull-up aerial that sourced the best coverage spots. It was crude by today’s standards naturally and performed a tiny fraction of the functions, rendering comparisons impossible. But what impact did it have on life and work back then for those lucky enough to have one?
You could argue that, in relative terms, it was one of the biggest leaps of all in the provision of connection for those on the move. All told, the impact was seismic, just as the emergence of the smartphone was many years later.
Maybe you had to live it to appreciate its significance, the greater freedom it allowed. But if you didn’t you can at least gauge the kind of impact it had on society with a little imagination.
Imagination is required too to embrace the feature that is running all this week in the Irish Independent as Martin Breheny tabulates his top 20 hurlers and footballers in every county
Everything now is done better by a multiple. But it doesn’t make the overall product better
over the last 50 years. It is an onerous task, laced with far greater mines than the more routine task of picking a team from the same era. At least with a team there is a cut-off point that divides those in and those out.
With a top 20, the debate continues as to who should supplant who in the running order after they have made the ‘cut.’ And, naturally, there can never be uniformity of thought.
Some might argue that players from previous decades should bear no comparison to today’s players in such an exercise. And there is some merit in that given the physical and technical advantages they embrace these days.
Lockdown has naturally given rise to nostalgia and footage of old games has been popular. But with that has come confirmation of an inconvenient truth about standards then compared to now.
The 1994 Derry/Down Ulster quarter-final in Celtic Park is generally held up as one of the games of a particularly attritional era and got an airing recently. Held up against the light of today’s standards, its quality becomes a harder sell, however, but, like that first cumbersome mobile phone model, the impact is very much of its time.
Similarly, the 2005 All-Ireland semi-final between Tyrone/Armagh represented an apex of a rivalry where every ball developed into a ferocious contest.
But again, through the lens of today, some 15 years on, the mistakes in possession stand out.
No one can argue that players today run faster for longer, kick more accurately and show a range of skills and team work that was much more fleetingly in evidence in the past.
Everything now is done better by a multiple. But conversely, that doesn’t mean that the overall product always turns out better though the catalogue of great games in both codes bulges more in the last decade just past than any of the previous ones, irrespective of your era. The shift to more possession-orientated games in hurling and in football though has brought more predictable patterns to play. More often than not, you know what’s coming next.
And that disengages some who have grown accustomed to having hurling and football served up to them in a different manner, those that liked the uncertainty created by the mistakes and the cavalier approach to possession that placed more onus on the intended target, not the origin of it, an approach that created so many more contests.
In looking back to a different era you must consider how much rules and preparation differed so greatly and that also applies to lists the Irish Independent are presenting this week.
Everyone is of their time and assessing the impact they had at that time is the key to striking a balance in any list.
For the record, I think Brian Fenton has done enough in his five and a bit seasons to eclipse Brian Mullins and James McCarthy and slip in behind Stephen Cluxton on Dublin’s list. But then I probably didn’t fully appreciate the influence that Mullins could have on those Dublin games in the ’70s.
I might have had Bernard Brogan ahead of Jimmy Keaveney too. A Footballer of the Year in a year that his team didn’t win a provincial title or reach an All-Ireland final is quite special. But then you probably had to live through the impact a returning Keaveney brought to Dublin in the ’70s to really appreciate it. What I can appreciate is Jack O’Shea’s impact on the game, something borne out by his capture of four Footballer of the Year awards.
He kicked a few balls away in his time too and he’ll have a few more modern-day challengers for the No 1 position when the final audit is in, Peter Canavan and Cluxton among them. But all things considered he should prevail, just as Henry Shefflin should prevail on the hurling list.