Fitzmaurice doesn’t expect new rule to leave indelible mark

Paul Brennan got the early pre-season thoughts of Kerry manager Eamonn Fitzmaurice ahead of the McGrath Cup starting this weekend

A week after coming into being as the GAA’s newest addition to the playing rules of Gaelic football, Kerry will be among the first counties to road test the mark - a rule designed by the Association to reward clean catches in the middle of the field and also, possibly, make the game slightly more attractive as a spectacle and to play.

That’s lot to hope for from a rule that has been met with, at best, indifference and, at worst - in some places - by resistance. For all that, it’s here and ready to be rolled out this weekend for good or ill.

There are concerns that the very thing the rule was brought in to improve - high fielding and quickening up the game - could be the very things that are further sacrificed by the mark.

Few serious teams are going to risk handing the advantage of the mark possession to an opposition when they can persist with the short kick-out strategy they’ve been working on diligently for the past few years.

As for speeding up the game by making opponents back off the ‘marked’ player, well, let’s just wait and see how free and easy the hitherto midfield jungle becomes over the weeks and months ahead.

Certainly Eamonn Fitzmaurice isn’t foreseeing any seismic shift away from the present path the game is already on.

“I don’t think it’s going to make a huge pile of difference to be honest,” the Kerry manager said in his first utterances of the new year to the local media on Monday. “I’d be interested to see how it works but I think so many teams now are taking short kick-outs, only kicking the ball 10 or 15 yards, that the mark doesn’t come into play then. Obviously if you can win the ball further out the field, you win it and you get a free, and can move it one quickly it can be advantageous.

“Of course it is something that we will look at because we have midfielders that are good fielders and are strong in the air it is something that we should try and use for sure.

“I’d be open-minded to see how it pans out. I just think a lot of teams won’t really use it as a tool. They’ll chip it out and go from there because a lot of teams seem to place so much emphasis on getting possession straight away, that’s just the way the game has gone.”

Fitzmaurice, with new selector Maurice Fitzgerald joining Mikey Sheehy and Liam Hassett on the sideline, was back in training on Tuesday night with the Kerry panel, their first collective meeting on a football field since last August’s ill-fated All-Ireland semi-final loss to Dublin. Water under the bridge, and a new course to chart, with Sunday’s McGrath Cup opener against Tipperary the first step on the long journey to what more than a few will hope/ believe will be another meeting with Dublin in September’s All-Ireland Final.

Only Sunday isn’t quite the first step. In Austin Stack Park the management will go to the stands and watch the county’s Under-21 team take on Tipperary; Fitzmaurice preferring to take a holistic view of Jack O’Connor’s squad with a view to pulling in a couple of players for the first two rounds of the National League.

It will be Sunday week, in Mallow against Cork, before the senior squad is employed.

“The lads have been following their gym programmes, we did a bit of fitness testing in December but really we’re just starting back this week,” Fitzmaurice confirmed. “We took a decision (that) we could have done a bit of training in December but we felt it would be counter-productive because a lot of the lads have played a lot of football. We just felt that there’d be something fresh about coming back at the start of January and getting ready to go again. It would give fellas a small bit of scope in December to recover and rest up the bodies and get ready to go again.”

As for Maurice, the manager is clear as to what his erstwhile team mate will bring to the party.

“Obviously Diarmuid Murphy is a big loss and he had given great service to Kerry for the last number of years, he was a selector with Jack and then he came on board with me.

“What Maurice will bring is his personality, the type of person that he is, to the dressing room. He will be very good with players, very good one on one with players, particularly with the forwards, so I see him having a big role there. I think when people see Maurice they think that he is very happy-golucky, easy-going kind of person, and maybe he projects that, but there is serious steel behind that personality as well. I think he will bring that as well.

“He will bring a bit of freshness, he is a ferociously honest person. I think last year when Liam (Hassett) came in he brought a great freshness to the management and to the whole set-up and I would be hoping for something similar from Maurice this year. I think he will bring a lot to the table and looking forward to working with him this

year.”