Patience needed with experimental rules and Central Council now needs to show it

IF I HAVE one piece of advice for Central Council delegates today as they consider their next move on football’s experimental rules, it’s this: Hold your nerve.

Players and coaches aren’t the people who should dictate what happens next. Their aims, naturally, are self-interested and short-term. That’s not their fault. But our games belong to everybody, they belong to the whole GAA community.

And, like it or not, Gaelic football ceased to be a spectacle some time ago. To be perfectly honest, I’ve no great issue with any of the changes we’ve seen in pre-season competition.

The three handpass restriction? Maybe stretch it to four, but don’t abandon it.

But consider this. If a team loads 14 bodies into their own half, the three handpass restriction then presents them with a quandary in possession.

Bodies

With nobody in the opposition half, they can’t kick long. And they’ll probably run out of handpasses by the time they’re on their own ’45.

In that scenario, a penny, surely, has to eventually drop. ‘We have to leave some bodies up there!’

People need to start looking at this long-term and, at the very least, let’s see how it works in the National League.

Managers, players and even the GPA have all been heaping pressure on Central Council to abandon the experiment. I honestly hope they don’t.

Listen, things might even get uglier before they get better, but the new rules are well intentioned and, face it, the vast majority of people believe something is needed to make our game more attractive.

It’s Central Council’s duty to listen to their voices.