Still much too soon to judge the mark

THERE was nothing particularly impressive about it. Just a man out in front of his marker, an acre of space in front of him, taking a twenty metre pass into his chest, a little under thirty metres from goal. As we say nothing remotely remarkable about it just the type of thing you’ve seen a thousand times before and forget about as soon as you’ve seen it.

Except that this time Michael Murphy called for and received a mark and, with that big booming right foot of his, fired it over David Clarke in the Mayo goal for the lead point in the game with thirty minutes on the clock.

Something about it just didn’t feel right. It felt cheap. It felt unearned and to a lot of people it felt anathema to their conception of the game. That we can understand. It didn’t strike us as particularly edifying either.

It was all a little too clinical and, dare we say it, polite as Murphy glided to collect the ball and the mark with ease. Needless to say Gaelic football isn’t supposed to be polite.

Still we baulk at declaring the mark rule dead on arrival on the basis of one single incident, as uncomfortable viewing as it may have been to a lot of us.

There’s an obvious counterpoint we can draw to Murphy’s mark in Ciarán Kilkenny’s against Kerry in Croke Park. Even traditionalists would find favour in that. The Castleknock man jostling with Tadhg Morley and Gavin Crowley for position, rising highest and claiming the ball before converting the mark to make it a single-point game. Nothing unearned about that you’d have to say.

That’s probably closer to what the advocates of the advanced mark had in mind when they voted it through at last October’s special congress and could act be a guide to what tweaks might need to be carried out to the new rule to make it the success people want it to be.

Probably there’s a case to be made for restricting the advanced mark to catches inside the twenty metre line where there will be more of a contest for possession, but again let’s give it another few weeks and another few games before coming to any firm conclusions.

We’ve barely scratched the surface as of yet with the advanced mark.