The supporter: Jim Gavin on the right road to save GAA football

IT may be coincidence that Gavin rhymes with Davin.

GAA President Maurice Davin was the man charged with developing the playing regulations of football, hurling and athletics for the Association and his recommendations were accepted at its third meeting in Thurles in January 1885.

Davin sought a game that was a “fine manly game”, one which was not as vicious as rugby, a sport which he considered “brutal and demoralising.” His rules allowed for players to break away from the play to engage in wrestling matches, interestingly. ‘Schemozzles’ were not discouraged it seems. However, the first match under his rules ended scoreless. Perhaps the players were too busy shemozzling?

The rules have never stood still, though. In an attempt to allow for more scoring opportunities, wrestling sideshows were banned in 1886, although Mayo and Meath teams of 110 years later did their best to revive them.

There was plenty of tinkering with the scoring methodologies while sideline balls initially were thrown in soccer-style.

The numbers on a team were as high as 21 at one point while the length of a game was briefly eighty minutes at the start of the 1970’s.

I didn’t know this until reading Jack Mahon’s “A History of Gaelic Football” recently but the ‘solo run’ was not a feature of the game initially. It was truly a game of ‘catch and kick.’ We must credit a man called Seán Lavan from Kiltimagh, County Mayo for that particular innovation. Lavan, was one of Ireland’s top sprinters and represented his county at the Olympic Games of 1924 and 1928 while also excelling at handball.

He went on to study medicine at UCD and while there featured in Sigerson Cup winning teams. It was in a club game for UCD that he is said to have first executed the completely new tactic.

John D. Hickey, Gaelic Football correspondent of the Sunday Independent, recalled witnessing this phenomenon.

“The protestations to the referee of the game that a ‘culchie from Mayo is making his own rules’ convinced me that day may well have been the first occasion that the great Mayo athlete revolutionised Gaelic Football.” Would we have even heard of the likes of Pat Spillane, Michael Donnellan or Jack McCaffrey if they couldn’t capitalise on their pace with a mazy solo?

Now, here we are 139 years after Davin laid down the initial rules and there can scarcely have been a more crucial review of the status quo than the one Jim Gavin is undertaking.

I say that knowing full well that there is a cohort of people out there who see nothing wrong with football as it stands. Mostly they are under the age of forty and a lot of them appear to be riding the coaching gravy train either at club or county level. Many appear to be from Ulster, as it happens.

Then there are those of us, mostly over the age of forty who, while acknowledging that there were some awful games played ‘back in the day’ when it was man-on-man and catch and kick (with the odd solo), would still hark back to those games as being better than the modern version.

I’d argue todays Gaelic Football is basically ‘Soccer with Handball.’ Watch the patterns next time you are at a game. The goalkeeper gets the ball and the players fan out across the pitch. The ball is passed left to right across the backline as the opposition team hare back into their own half to form a ‘low block’ as I believe it is called in the parlance of the eleven-aside game.

Gradually the play inches forward across the midfield area, left to right, back to the centre, out to the left again as teams probe for an opening, hand-pass following hand-pass. Waiting for one of fifteen defenders to switch off for a second to leave a yard of space. All we need are a few pitch invaders, clothed or otherwise, and VAR and we may as well be watching Euro 2024.

The recent Senior Football League semi-finals in Kildare were prime examples of the boring, boring football being foisted upon players and supporters, so it is not just at county level or in Ulster.

One of the problems with this conservative, hold the ball at all costs, approach, is that traditional skills are being lost. Seán Lavan would be lambasted from the sideline (by the way when are the number of ‘mentors’ dotted around the Hawkfield pitch going to be addressed?) for deigning to go on a solo run.

Players can almost get through a game without having to kick the ball. Point scoring from range is a lost art as the percentages suggest recycling the ball is your only man.

Sadly, that is the only game the current players know, so of course they will defend it. They might even enjoy it they hide it well if they do. Smiling is banned along with solos and kicking.

But as an older supporter, I would like to think of the possibilities of a game played by today’s super-fit, well-conditioned athletes, which does encourage and emphasise some of the traditional skills of the game, and I believe Jim Gavin is very much on the right track with his ideas, particularly keeping a certain number of players forward at all times and a restriction on what the goalkeeper can do.

Trial games have to be taken in context, and with caution, but I was enthused by feedback I heard from players from one Kildare club who took part in those trials recently. Offaly’s Nigel Dunne also did a great piece reviewing one game he played in.

In particular he was enthused by the rule that insists three forwards stay forward (the clue is in their name), freeing up space, making it more difficult to defend en-masse and promoting more one-on-one battles, describing himself as ‘like a child on Christmas morning’ in a game that finished 4-12 to 4-9 over just 45 minutes of play.

Stephen Poacher, Paddy Tally & co will be having conniptions. Good. Bring it on.

Cill Dara Abú