Greek gods’ style can pay off in GAA
RNow 38, it was the striker’s headed winner against Portugal at the 2004 European Championships that secured his own place in modern Greek mythology, and cemented the country’s place in the record books.
A teenage Cristiano Ronaldo played that same afternoon. The player, who just last week became Europe’s all-time top scorer and who is eyeing up the Golden Boot award in the ongoing World Cup, endured one of the most frustrating outings of his international career.
That the coup took place in Lisbon, where the hosts were expecting a coronation, only compounded Greece’s sense of achievement.
All that was left was an argument over the beautiful game. Greece’s critics, of which there EMEMBER Angelos Charisteas? Rory Gallagher does. In January, the former Greek international footballer opened a restaurant-café in downtown Amsterdam, his name on the business a big part of the plan to make it a tourist trap. were plenty, railed against this incarnation of ‘anti-football’: the park-the-bus mentality of retreating en masse at times to the edge of the box; taking up carefully choreographed zonal defensive conditions; hitting on the counter or from set plays (Charisteas’ second-half winner was a header from a corner); the capacity to preserve a lead and bleed the clock with men behind the ball. Sound familiar? In a previous interview, Gallagher name-checked Greece’s achievement. The David-versusGoliath theme of the story appealed to someone from a county that had only ever appeared in six Ulster finals, that is one of only two — along with Wicklow — never to win a senior provincial football final.
If the European champions remained largely unloved outside their own shores, they were immortalised at home.
So Gallagher, just like in Donegal when he rode shotgun with Jim McGuinness and then took charge himself, decided to reinterpret the parable of Greece for a modern Gaelic football audience.
The All-Ireland Senior Football Championship is not a beauty contest. It’s not a sporting version of the Rose of Tralee where pride of place goes to the prettiest face in the room, or the prettiest face with a winning personality.
It’s about winning. Gallagher understands that.
Right now though, one of the game’s eternal truths seems more like an uncomfortable truth.
At half-time in Sunday’s Ulster final between Fermanagh and Donegal, RTÉ’s studio panel of Colm O’Rourke, Pat Spillane and Joe Brolly danced gleefully on the grave of football’s defensive systems. All three have long opposed the aesthetics of such systems and called it that the game was done, that Donegal would win by what they wanted to. Which they duly did.
An open and shut case? Well, not quite.
This is the same system that saw Fermanagh clinch promotion from Division 3, enjoying a rare outing at Croke Park in the process. They turned over an Armagh team who flaunted existing rules by heading to Portugal for a pre-match training camp, judging by reports and limited them to just seven points in the Ulster quarter-final. Then they produced the shock of the summer by beating Monaghan in the semi-final, the same Monaghan who were being talked up as the second-best team in the country to Dublin after the nature of their win against Tyrone.
For the opening stages in the Ulster final, Fermanagh actually threw a curve ball by going long from their own kick-outs — they won their first four — and committing bodies to attack. To do a Greece and try and get ahead, then preserve a lead. Except Donegal struck for two goals and headed into half-time with an eight-point lead — the limitations of Fermanagh’s set-up were now exposed in chasing a game.
Ciarán Whelan and Tomás Ó Sé were more forgiving on The Sunday Game but the former’s rationale that ‘it’s not going to beat the better teams… it will bring you so far’ doesn’t stack up with the previous round. A Division 3 team (Fermanagh) beat the only Division 1 team (Monaghan) to beat All-Ireland champions Dublin this year. That’s before Carlow (Division 4) beating Kildare (Division 2) in Leinster, with another version of a defensive, counterattacking set-up.
In aesthetic terms, it’s not pretty. But it can be pretty effective in terms of trying to break through a county’s glass ceiling.
At the end of the Ulster final, the difference was 12 points, Donegal 2-18 Fermanagh 0-12. So, how do you square that with the Munster final where Cork lost by 3-18 to 2-4 to Kerry (17 points), their greatest Championship defeat to the old enemy in 80 years? Without a blanket defensive system but with a designated sweeper as extra cover. Or the Leinster final where Laois kicked the ball plenty, went at Dublin, yet lost by an even greater margin, 1-25 to 0-10 (18 points)?
Gallagher’s brief doesn’t extend to being a guardian of the game.
Croke Park’s Standing Committee on Playing Rules is there for just that purpose. Two of their most recent changes — the ‘mark’ from a kick-out and the kick-out having to cross the 20-metre mark — were both clear attempts to encourage teams to go long, to give teams an added weapon in dealing with defensive systems. Which is what the neutral wants, what the armchair viewer wants.
But a county’s own supporters? They just want success. That’s why the streets of Clones were a heaving sea of green and white beforehand, why the atmosphere at St Tiernach’s Park was electric when the ball was thrown up.
It has never been any other way. O’Rourke’s Meath weren’t bothered with aesthetics — they could win any which way. And did just that in 1987-88.
Spillane’s native Kerry shapeshifted to another version of Donegal to win the 2014 final. Derry’s landmark 1993 All-Ireland, with Brolly in tow, was built on a grim battle of nerve and character in a Clones quagmire against Donegal, an Ulster final that ended just 0-8 to 0-6. Aesthetics didn’t come into it.
The All-Ireland Championship is not about who plays the prettiest football.
All the top teams understand that. And all the top managers.
It’s not about who plays the prettiest type of football