February 17, 2011
By Staff Reporter
One presumes that the GAA honchos who have come up with the latest proposed set of rule changes are familiar with McDermott’s research and one wonders why more people in the game aren’t outraged by it. More than anything else, the increasing reliance on the handpass has diminished the frequency and quality of kicking and catching, and led to situations where, for long spells, championship matches have come to resemble bad rugby league. Players swarm together, making slow forward progress in something that looks way too much like a rolling scrum.
Against this background, you’d hope that any group investigating the possibility of rule changes to improve the code would have gone for something truly radical and desperately needed like proposing that the handpass be banned for the duration of the forthcoming National Football League. Imagine the excitement that would have created. People who haven’t darkened the door of a county ground this side of late May might suddenly find themselves strolling along to check out the impact of this ground-breaking regulation. Apart from a bump in attendances, we’d have seen the games revolutionized. No bad thing that.
Instead of lifting the spirits and shortening the winter with that kind of enlightened move though, Central Council has signed off on the following experiment that will be put before Congress next year: “When a player is in possession of the ball it may be struck with an open hand or a fist provided there is a definitive striking action [the current rule just allows for striking with the fist].”
Great. If this goes through, it will mean even more handpassing. Just what the game needs. The authorities have simply made it easier for the referees to officiate. They’ve more or less acknowledged that so much illegal throwing of the ball goes on that it would be better to bend the rules rather than to try to properly enforce them. As backward steps go, this is as depressing as it is troubling. It also begs a serious question.
In the last 20 years has any member of Central Council ever left a game of Gaelic football at any level and said to their colleagues: “That was some wonderful handpassing we saw out there there.” Thought not. There’s more to be asked in this vein. When was the last time fans left a match at any level, from street league to inter-county, and were dying to tell people about a thrilling player they saw because he was a great man to deliver a handpass. Never? Thought so too.
This is not one of the prized skills of the sport. It is not something that ever gets the supporters’ blood rushing or causes them to enthuse in any way about their team. When Cork were in full flight last summer, their followers weren’t waxing lyrical about how many passes the defenders were stringing together around their own full back line. In my experience, far more sciolists could be heard praising the overall performances while still lamenting this ridiculous urge to move the ball back and forth laterally by the hand.
Removing the handpass from the forthcoming league would have given us a glimpse of what the game can still be. At its best, when free-flowing and stretching the play all over the field, Gaelic football is like no big ball game in the world. At its worst thought, it’s a poor man’s soccer, now replete with people firing hand-passes twenty yards backwards towards their own goal. Memo to GAA hardliners: Nobody in soccer applauds when a player strokes the ball backwards to his own goalkeeper either.
In one fell swoop, Croke Park could have ended this sort of torturous carry-on and forced the best players in the country to rely solely on their kicking ability. In many cases this would have meant a lot of elite inter-county stars having to learn a new skill because, let’s be honest here, many of them still haven’t quite mastered the art of kicking a ball even in their early twenties. How could they have when, as was pointed out several times this past summer, many teams warm up for championship matches with 15 minutes of hand-passing drills and absolutely no kicking. Gaelic football? Surely some mistake.
There’s more to it than making players learn or re-learn the basic skills. Removing the handpass would cut down on so much of the worst violence that afflicts the modern game. There would be less bunching around the middle of the field, less of the rugby-like running in diagonal waves down the field, and far more one on one battles. Call me old-fashioned but isn’t the mano a mano aspect of the game one of its most attractive features. What beats two players competing for a 50-50 ball in splendid isolation? Twenty yard backward handpasses?
This would be only one of the many benefits of such a radical change. There are so many others. A lot of modern teams are peopled by impressive athletes rather than talented footballers. It has been commonplace for managers to plump for players with the ability to run up and down the field at pace, and just enough talent to throw the ball at speed. Getting rid of the handpass would force managers to rely less on overbearing athleticism and physical fitness and more on actual, skilful footballers. Who in their right mind would be against that?