If anyone can, Gavin can...
Dublin’s iconic manager has the credentials to ‘fix’ football
TEN years ago, in the foyer of a Boston hotel surrounded by a media huddle, Jim Gavin offered us an intriguing glimpse of his strategic powers. When asked if there was a competition structure that could serve Gaelic football better, he offered up a suggestion that seven years later would morph into a blueprint for the game.
He argued for a second-tier championship, the provincial championships to replace the Allianz League at the start of the season and the preliminary stages of the All-Ireland championships to be played on a Champions League format.
That was effectively the proposal that was put to GAA Congress in 2021 and narrowly rejected, before a compromise proposal was passed that arrived at the structure that is currently in place – which has also delivered the Champions League format that Gavin had argued for a decade earlier.
There were many reasons why Jarlath Burns selected Gavin to head up a Gaelic Football Review Committee, not least the gravitas that a six-time All-Ireland winning manager will gift its findings when they are published at the end of the year. However, it is Gavin’s reputation as a master of strategic thinking that was the biggest hook of all.
It is this reputation that has meant he has been a man in demand ever since he sensationally quit in the winter of 2019 after eight record-breaking seasons as Dublin manager.
In the interim, his pilot background has seen him take a pivotal role in the Irish Aviation Authority as director of people and operations, he has chaired an 80-strong citizen assembly that has published a report calling for a directly elected mayor of Dublin while also taking up a pro bono role as chair of the North East Inner City Implementation Board.
That is a CV which, should he ever take the notion, would make him a shoo-in to lead the GAA, never mind one of its committees.
There is an element of poacher turned gamekeeper in his appointment in that he was on the frontline at a time when football went through its most striking evolution, which many would argue was not for the better.
But it was also a period that played to his strategic strengths.
In 2014, he was suckered tactically for the one and only time in his reign when he allowed his team to get entangled in Donegal’s defensive web.
Three years later, at the same stage of the championship, Mickey Harte weaved an almost identical defensive blanket as McGuinness, but this time Gavin’s team prioritised taking care of the ball, moving it laterally outside the screen to win a bloodless encounter.
It may not have been pretty, but in so doing Gavin revealed that blanket defensive gameplans could no longer be deployed to win championships.
It is noteworthy that both Eamonn Fitzmaurice and James Horan are also members of his committee as it was also during this period that Gaelic football was showcased at its very best when teams dared to take his great Dublin side on.
Restoring the game to becoming a spectacle again will be high on his priority list. As to what that will entail only time will reveal.
What is almost certain is that one of the committee’s recommendations will be to bin football’s advanced mark.
It is a play design, introduced with minimal debate at GAA Congress in 2020, which has been loathed by virtually every stakeholder in the game, with Gavin among those heavy-hitters who has voiced their disapproval.
Cutting off what does not work is the easy bit, coming up something new is the challenge.
‘When I see some of these rules committees giving statistics
The tackle is not well defined, that is the root cause of the problems
behind games, it’s like me doing an air accident investigation and just looking at the flight data recorder and the flight data recorder is going to tell me everything that went on in the flight,’ Gavin said in an interview a couple of years ago, which gave an insight into how he will approach this role.
‘You need the cockpit voice recorder, I need to know about the training that the pilots were under, I need to know the organisation culture, the environment, the value set, and that will inform me what the root cause of the accident was. So I don’t think we have gone in deep enough to see what the root cause is.’
In that same interview, Gavin also hinted at what he believes is the ‘root cause’ of football’s ills.
‘The tackle isn’t that well defined in football. That’s the root cause of it. There is work to be done on that.’
In Jim Gavin, football has the man to do that piece of work.