Deserves the benefit of our doubt

order to win games. Certainly, Fitzmaurice’s greatest achievement – winning the 2014 All-Ireland final against Donegal – saw his Kerry team play in a way that was the antithesis of Kerry football, but needs must and all that.

Colm Collins, working with far more mediocre playing talent, got the maximum out of his Clare teams in a most pragmatic way, though he always tried to remain faithful to the way most people like to see Gaelic football played. Ditto Horan with Mayo and O’Rourke with the teams he has coached and managed.

Gavin himself send several of his Dublin teams out to play some of the most gorgeous football we have seen in the modern era, albeit with a phalanx of some of the best men to ever play the game, though the former Air Corps man was always adept at setting his teams up to play meat and two veg football when the need arose.

The brief for the review committee, one would hope, will be to improve the game as an experience for the players and as a spectacle for those watching it. To that end, Gavin and his committee will have to park their managerial sensibilities and revisit the love of the game they had as players themselves. They need to watch football through their players and supporters eyes rather than as managers and then devise ways and rule changes to make it a better game than it is now.

It seems that there are more names to be added to Burns’s FRC, and one sincerely hopes that it would include a few players very recently retired from the inter-county game. It’s not far off 20 years since Fitzmaurice stopped playing with Kerry, and longer since Horan and Gavin retired from inter-county football. There is a danger that recency bias could take over and the manager in them overrides the player.

Every year some of the game’s best players retire, so it shouldn’t be difficult for Burns or Gavin to recruit a few of the more recent retirees to lend what would be insightful first-hand input into how it is to actually play the modern inter-county game and, more crucially, what’s wrong with it and what might make it better to play.

Speaking at a media briefing following the GAA’s Congress in Newry, Burns said: “I really felt that this particular committee... I felt I really needed big names from the world of football, who have managed at the highest level. They understand the game, how to coach the game.

“I met Jim Gavin four times. I’ve been having meetings with him now since October, I have to be honest, I have never met somebody as impressive as he is. Even all of the preparations we have done, linking the rationale back to the strategic plan, doing all of that work that has to be done, putting out the terms of reference.”

It’s a strong start from the new president but this particular football review committee will not only be as good as the people on it, but will be judged on what they come up with and if and how their recommendations can be put into play to make the game a better one.