For all its flaws, football is still box office
McGuinness and Harte add spice to new season
MATCHES are just a means of punctuating the rolling crises that sometimes feel like the story of the GAA. Hysteria about the collapse of football was a useful means of passing the five-month close season. It was feared that the absence of inter-county matches from August through to January would hand competing codes an advantage.
Far more off-putting has been the hand-wringing and misplaced nostalgia that fuelled much of the discussion around where football is going wrong.
The game’s faults are obvious, but the case for radical solutions has not been convincingly made. Hankering after the time of six backs and six forwards is to try and wallow in a glorious past that never fully existed. More worryingly, it is also an effort to send football hurtling back to an age when everyone played the same – a status quo that suited only the best teams.
Modern coaching methods have drawbacks, and the resulting spectacles can be an eyesore, but at the very least they helped to democratise the game.
Counties that shouldn’t have been able to compete suddenly won AllIrelands – and the inspirations behind the two most dramatic breakthroughs are making news in the first week of the year.
Those predicting the end of football, as well as being sensationalist, are also wrong. For all the sport’s faults, people remain devoted to it.
Tailbacks in Ballybofey on Wednesday night were proof of the excitement that has been resurrected in Donegal by the return of Jim McGuinness.
This time last year, the county was on the cusp of a wretched spring that would culminate in relegation, and the resignation of Paddy Carr before the end of March.
The talent within the squad would indicate that this was an under-performing group, but expectation has rocketed not because of renewed faith in the players, but because of McGuinness.
Donegal supporters are entitled to their optimism, given the past wonders inspired by him. Predictions of the county making the last four are not outlandish, but they rest almost entirely on what the manager did a decade ago.
The game has changed since then, but not as dramatically as he changed it when turning his county from punchlines into All-Ireland champions.
Repeating that transformation looks a steep challenge, but if there is a coach in the game who can open a new tactical front, it is him.
The prospect of constraining talents like McGuinness with drastic rule changes is absurd. Trying to force every team to play a certain way is reductive, and a surrender to old thinking, of the sort that wailed about ‘puke football’ 20 years ago.
It was Mickey Harte that bewildered the ancien regime, and on the same night McGuinness was bringing Ballybofey to a standstill, Harte was standing on a sideline in the colours of Derry.
His ability to challenge convention has been one of the most important agents of change in football for decades, but in leaving Louth and taking over Derry, he pushed against established thinking with a boldness that was remarkable even for him.
In accepting the job, he took on a task that is doubly difficult. First, there are the issues of a man that made Tyrone great taking over one of their fierce rivals. But more prosaically – and much more relevantly – he is endeavouring to gain an extra edge with a group whose achievements over the past two seasons have been extraordinary.
They have been squeezed out of All-Ireland semi-finals in each of the past two seasons, and were well placed in July to get past Kerry and reach a final for the first time in 30 years.
Harte will now try to get more out of them, and specifically out of a squad who were expertly schooled by Rory Gallagher before his departure following convulsive allegations about his private life mid-Championship.
Yet Harte accepted, deploying logic, as he sees it, to explain his decision. Reports from Breffni Park and Wednesday’s win against Cavan described Harte in reliable sideline form: largely still, eyes burning into the action on the field, while the first noises of the year emerged from within the slumbering football constituency.
The game is clambering out of hibernation, blinking in the meagre light of January and smelling a familiar panic on the wind.
Football is dead! Who will save it?
Those waiting patiently to get into Mac Cumhaill Park to cheer Donegal were not queuing for a corpse house. The Derry fans intrigued to know if there is another level in their heroes are not checking for pulses.
Football lives, its vital signs jolted by two familiar power sources.