YEAR OF THE KEEPER
How one position influenced Gaelic games in 2017
‘CLUXTON HAS FORCED THE ALTERATION OF THE GAME’S RULEBOOK’
IN time perhaps, some enterprising student with a love for Gaelic football will complete a PhD on the Stephen Cluxton kick-out. Even with all the technological advances in terms of live software analysis, and post-match analysis, the set-piece still carries the whiff of intrigue and undocumented mystery of a Mona Lisa smile.
Studying it is one thing; reproducing it quite another. From one angle it means something to an opposition manager; from another something else entirely.
In so many ways, this has been The Year of the Goalkeeper. In football and hurling.
Never before have two goalkeepers been nominated for Footballer of the Year, to the extent that the rules of the selection process had to be bent out of shape to incorporate both. Instead of the usual short-list of three, the differing claims of Cluxton versus Mayo’s outstanding shot-stopper David Clarke were such that to nominate one above the other would be deemed to pre-judge the actual All-Star debate itself for the number one jersey.
And so four players were ultimately put forward. It will be the story of the final selection when a player nominated for that ultimate honour doesn’t even make the final 15 selection.
This, in a summer when Cluxton broke the record for all-time Championship appearances, passing out the Ó Sé brothers – Tomás and Marc – who held the record of 88 at the start of summer. By the time he climbed the steps of the Hogan Stand in September to receive the cup for the fourth time as captain – another record – he ended the summer on 91, one appearance ahead of Tyrone’s Seán Cavanagh.
He has redefined the role of a goalkeeper in Gaelic football, has been so far ahead of the curve, that it’s forcing an alteration of the rulebook to keep pace. At the recent Special Congress, just one delegate spoke against the new rule that restricts a goalkeeper in Gaelic football to kicking laterally or out towards the corners.
‘We are punishing the team that wants to innovate and rewarding the teams who want to play negatively. This rewards the people that can’t play ball properly,’ insisted Dublin delegate Mick Seavers.
Again, Cluxton was one of those who identified that the rule saying the ball had to travel 13 metres didn’t necessarily mean 13 metres forward but sideways or backwards.
Seavers called it out as trying, in some small way, to undermine Dublin’s modern dominance of the game and the influence of their captain. No other player has been as influential in Dublin’s five AllIrelands this past seven seasons, or the four Allianz Leagues in a row.
Lawmakers insist that it’s a means of ensuring Gaelic football is a kicking game where the ball has to travel, the ‘mark’ for players who catch a kick-out that goes past the 45, was introduced in a similar vein.
Early in the All-Ireland semi-final against Tyrone, when Mickey Harte’s team pushed up, Cluxton fired a ball over the line of opposition attack to Niall Scully roughly 65 metres away. In its precision and flight path, it resembled one of those mechanical machines that spits out baseballs at 100 miles per hour to aid batting practice.
In that moment, Tyrone’s gameplan suddenly had an emperor’s new clothes look about it.
This, at a time when hurling has undergone the same transformative process in terms of the influence of the player who wears the number one jersey – the best now being a combination of goalkeeper, sweeper and quarterback all rolled into one. Free-taking and penaltytaking come as optional extras. Last weekend, Kanturk won Cork’s Premier Intermediate final to secure senior status for the first time. All-Star nominated Anthony Nash was central to that journey – and the final drama.
With the game on a knife-edge entering added time, Kanturk were awarded a penalty. It was Nash who travelled the length of the field to take it. While his strike was saved, his inter-county team mate Lorcán McLoughlin swept the ball over the bar in a frantic follow up. Kanturk sneaked home by two with Nash’s shot-stopping earlier in the game a distinguishing feature.
This is the same player whose influence on Cork’s resurgence in the Munster Championship was such that Waterford manager Derek McGrath revealed that his team had three different plans configured in order to limit his influence in the Munster semi-final. On the day, none worked, Nash’s arrowed interplay with Mark Coleman and Conor Lehane was crucial again to victory.
Waterford did turn the tables in the All-Ireland semi-final rematch where Nash endured his hardest day of the summer, explainable in part though because Lehane was not the same electric option since sustaining an ankle injury.
Nash, Waterford’s Stephen O’Keeffe and Galway’s Colm Callanan all made the All-Star shortlist of three in a year when no other position had a list of stronger contenders.
Eoin Murphy of Kilkenny was an All-Star nominee any other year while Mark Fanning was one of Wexford’s best players – taking and saving penalties and even scoring frees. In the pivotal League fixture when Wexford effectively secured promotion by beating Galway in Salthill, Fanning fronted up to rattle home a penalty.
‘It’s probably changed completely from where you’re in your six-yard box,’ explained Eoin Murphy back in the spring.
‘You’re playing a bit more. Like Davy Fitz, he probably played a bit on the 14 and 21 and then Dónal Óg [Cusack] with the likes of his puckouts and then Brendan Cummins and Damien Fitzhenry with their
shot-stopping ability. It has come on leaps and bounds.’
A long-time fan of American football, Murphy stayed up till the early hours watching Tom Brady rewrite the history books at the Super Bowl. In the modern game, the goalkeeper has become the game’s new quarterback.
That’s not forgetting the core principles of the position. In the upstairs office at Nowlan Park, one of the old photos that adorns the wall is of iconic goalkeeper Ollie Walsh plucking a ball from under the crossbar in the 1967 All-Ireland final against Tipperary. Murphy’s salmon-leap and catch under the crossbar to deny Waterford in last year’s semi-final replay bridged the generation gap in that respect.
As in football, the rule regarding penalty-taking has been changed because of the creative minds of goalkeepers. It’s Nash in the main who spawned a host of imitators with his exaggerated lift and strike that meant a ball lifted on the 20-metre line was being struck nearly on the 13-metre line.
His goal with 12 Clare players on the line in the 2013 All-Ireland final replay remains a thing of wonder.
Stephen O’Keeffe played a part in that rule change too, his decision to race off his line and take a Nash rocket to the body leaving a physical bruising that prompted a shift in thinking from the rulemakers.
This year, O’Keeffe and Waterford patented the goalkeeper one-two: a short stick pass to a defender on the 20-metre line, a sprint out to take the return, followed by a bombed clearance that has the capacity to reach the opposition full-forward line.
The evolution process continues.
‘NASH’S GOAL AGAINST CLARE IN 2013 WAS A THING OF BEAUTY ’