Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
A LONG TIME COMING
Curran: Game has been given kick-start
FORMER Roscommon keeper Shane Curran believes one minor change can have a big impact on Gaelic football. At Special Congress on Saturday, a motion to force goalkeepers to kick the ball beyond the 20metre line on restarts received 82% support and will take effect from January 1.
Yet while it may appear to be only a small tweak, Curran reckons it’ll be a game-changer.
“It certainly will have an impact, there’s no doubt about it,” he said.
“You’ll see a different type of transitioning of the game from the goalkeeper out. “You’ll see, even though the limit is the 20-metre line, kickouts going a lot longer because teams will be able to press up that little bit better. “I’d have gone a bit further and said that if the kickout goes past the 20-metre line that there should be no pass back to the goalkeeper but in terms of the kickout and the strategy itself I think it’s a good one. It’s a positive rule.”
More than half of the kickouts in last month’s All-ireland final didn’t cross the 20-metre line and Stephen Cluxton went short with all of his restarts in the second half.
Curran (inset) though, has no doubt that the Dublin goalkeeper will adapt well to the new ruling.
He continued: “I think my mother could have kicked out the ball to most of the Dublin players in the second half of the All-ireland final.
“While obviously Stephen has got a great range of skills, the short kickout philosophy Dublin employ doesn’t really need much of a skillset from the goalkeeper.
“I think, when we saw how Mayo pressed the kickout in the first half, their analysis at half-time would have said that they lost an awful lot of kickouts, particularly when they had to go long.
“So Dublin will work on that and they’ll find ways. At the end of the day, it isn’t that big a deal for them to kick the ball out past the 20-metre line and they will be able to create space by virtue of the fact that they’re fitter and stronger and more fluid and more flexible than any of the other players that they’re going to be coming up against, possibly until All-ireland final day.”