Not sure the GAA’s latest playing rule will really hit the mark

NOT long now before the newest playing rule in Gaelic football comes into play. The mark (we’re not sure if it the ‘mark’, the Mark, or just the mark) is all set to hit a football field near you on January 1 - or as soon as the new season comes into being in your area.

The new rule, 2.12 Mark, goes like this: a GAA rule wouldn’t be a GAA rule if there wasn’t some degree of ambiguity in there. The Mark duly obliges.

Number 3 in a list of seven interpretations offered by Central Council states: lead to disagreements between players and referees, with managers throwing their hands to the heavens at the injustice of it all. That much is obvious.

For all that, however, we wonder just how much affect, positive or otherwise, this new rule is really going to have on the game as we know it.

In theory the rule is there to encourage high-fielding and clean catching, and to reward it, and by extension, we assume, to bring a little of the aesthetic and thrill back to Gaelic football.

But are those teams that have spent months and years working on their short kickout strategy and who swear by a possession game suddenly going to abandon all that work for the occasional reward of a mark in the middle of the field?

Do we really think Stephen Cluxton is going to forego those short kickouts to Philly McMahon or Johnny Cooper to pike the ball out 45 metres in the vain hope that Brian Fenton might field the ball cleanly in a thicket of Tyrone or Mayo or Cork midfielders, half backs and half forwards?

Since Jim McGuinness’ Donegal and onward to Jim Gavin’s Dublin and now to just about any and every self-respecting All-Ireland title contender (not to mention many, many clubs teams) possession has become more than nine-tenths of the law. It is the be all and end all of modern football.

Spectators might still hark back for a Nicholas Murphy or Larry Tompkins to leap high into the air and land on his heels with the O’Neills tucked under his arm, but what self-respecting inter-county manager is going to instruct his goalkeeper to ‘spin the wheel’ with a long kickout on the off chance a midfielder might win it, when the short option to a ball playing corner back is the safer option?

The aspiration of the ‘mark’ is laudable but the reality of how it will materially change the game will be somewhat different we believe.