GAA Rule Changes

Sport
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:rolleyes:

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There is no need for these Congress type situations to worry themselves about the hurling rules. Tipp, Cork and Kilkenny will get together and some stage and let the rest know if anything needs changing.

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[quote=“Rocko”]Football:

1: 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).

2: Introduction of a free kick (or mark) for catching a kick-out between the two 45 metre lines. Free kick must be taken by the player who catches the ball.

3: The rule governing the bounce is redefined - there will be no foul unless the ball is caught. That appears to suggest that a player may bounce the ball more than once as long as the ball is not caught.

4: The square ball rule is to be altered greatly. An attacking player can now enter the small rectangle before the ball. There are three exceptions: a player cannot be in the square before the ball if from a sideline kick, a free-kick or a 45.

5: Statistics show that fewer penalties are being scored. Therefore it is proposed that the penalty kick be moved forward from the 13 metre line to 11 metres from goal.

6: To speed up play it is proposed that all kick-outs be taken from the 13 metre line.

7: To provide more clarity to the advantage rule, referees shall use clearly defined signals to indicate that the foul has been seen and is playing advantage.

8: It was thought that players are getting charged while picking up the ball. To refine the rule and add protection, instead of a fair charge definition using the words ‘side to side’, the rule should refer to a ‘shoulder to shoulder’ charge.

9: Topical in view of the controversy during the Cork and Tyrone match and borrowing a rule from rugby, it is suggested that after the full time whistle comes after the expiration of added time when the ball next crosses any boundary line.

[/quote]

  1. Makes sense and should clear up a lot of the confusion over what is a legitimate hand pass and what isn’t (more so at club level)

  2. I don’t see the point in the mark, it will only slow things down

  3. I believe this was always the case until recently. Makes no real difference.

  4. I don’t know what they hope to achieve with the square ball thing. As mentioned already you will just end up with Keepers being “marked” and fights breaking out.

  5. A load of bollix

  6. No harm in it

  7. Makes sense

  8. Makes sense

  9. Makes sense

24

It’s good that they’re thinking about changes in football though as it is some pile of boring scutter a lot of the time.

25

No doubt KIB man will be crestfallen that they haven’t reintroduced 2 points for the sideline cut


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Probaly take more than that to get him upset after yesterday’s win.

27

The mark thing only formalises what goes on at present anyway.

How many times have you seen a kick out caught cleanly only for the catcher to be fouled immediately?

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[quote=“cluaindiuic”]The mark thing only formalises what goes on at present anyway.

How many times have you seen a kick out caught cleanly only for the catcher to be fouled immediately?[/quote]

catching a kickout should result in clean possession, otherwise whats the point

what is worse, making a great catch and being dragged to the ground winning a free kick or having a great catch simply rewarded with a free kick

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[quote=“HBV*”]catching a kickout should result in clean possession, otherwise whats the point

what is worse, making a great catch and being dragged to the ground winning a free kick or having a great catch simply rewarded with a free kick[/quote]

I think that kickout strategies would completely change and goalkeepers would be far more inclined to look for a free man than boom it down the middle. IMO There would be a lot more spoiling going on in any contest for possession as the emphasis would be on preventing the clean catch, so you would actually end up with less clean catching as well as slowing the game down.

I would agree with trialling the “play on” rule at a free kick as in Aussie Rules as it would speed things up rather than slow them down, but that is the only element of their game that Gaelic Football should consider.

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[quote=“The Runt”]2. I don’t see the point in the mark, it will only slow things down
[/quote]

think its a great idea
look at tyrone
they nearly let a fella catch a ball uncontested from the kickout and then there’s 5 tyrone fellas waiting for him when he comes down and he is smothered up
high fielding is one of the great skills off gaelic football and should be encouraged


31

Agree with this, and i don’t think it will change kick out strategies any more than whats there really. If you have big men who can field you hit them, if your lacking there you work around it, simple as that.

32

Eugene Magee made a good point on Off The Ball this evening. He said that no other sport has a square ball so why should gaelic games?

Eejit.

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[quote=“Rocko”]Eugene Magee made a good point on Off The Ball this evening. He said that no other sport has a square ball so why should gaelic games?

Eejit.[/quote]

What a fucking retarded staement by Magee, no other sports use Hurls and sliotars so why should Hurling?

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i guess it would be pretty hard to play without hurls & sliotars

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:smiley: :clap: :thumbsup:

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both Magee and breheny have made good money from stating the plain obvious
neither of them offer anything insightful
:rolleyes:

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Didn’t know where to post this so said I would throw it in here

interesting piece from Enda McEvoy is last weeks Trubune

Talking about a revolution
We won’t see the results in our lifetime but the seeds of a major attitude change to hurling must be sown now if the game is to thrive
Enda McEvoy

This Congress hereby agrees that the Association will in future channel the bulk of its resources into hurling instead of football, with the aim of making hurling the number one Gaelic sport in all counties by the time of, or before, the Association’s 150th anniversary"

(Text of motion adopted at GAA Congress in Newcastle, County Down, 17 April 2010)

It is 2034, the year of the GAA’s 150th anniversary. It is the second-last Sunday in August, the dates of the All Ireland finals having been brought forward when the Association went all Gregorian a few seasons earlier and revamped their playing calendar. On the podium of the Hogan Stand at Croke Park, Donal Óg Cusack, the president of the GAA, hands over the McCarthy Cup to a man in a white jersey. “Is mór an onóir dom,” the victorious captain bellows, “an corn seo a glacadh ar son foireann Chill Dara!”

It is a scene that couldn’t have been dreamt of in January 2010. If Kildare had neither won an All Ireland in hurling during the previous 126 years nor threatened to (and they hadn’t won one in football during the previous 83 years), they were scarcely likely to win one over the course of the next 24. But that was before the extraordinary events of a few months later, when Congress was taken over by a group of hurling revolutionaries under Liam Griffin with an equally revolutionary manifesto.

Hurling, they declared, was far too important to be left any longer to the GAA, who had consistently failed the game by leaving it up to individual counties to nurture it – with disastrous consequences. Things had degenerated, they claimed, to the stage where, with the small-ball code the poor relation in 20 of the 32 counties, the Association would be better off abandoning responsibility for the sport altogether instead of continuing to pay it lip service. Decades of speaking softly had not worked; it was time to brandish a big stick. Their minds perhaps concentrated by the sight of the pikes carried by Griffin and his cohorts, the delegates at Congress 2010 agreed that the organisation would henceforth strive to turn hurling, a national treasure, into the national game. Kildare’s McCarthy Cup triumph of 2034, defeating Cork in a thrilling final, underlines the success of the project.

A pipedream scenario? Almost certainly. But basic common sense says that if hurling is ever to break out of its geographical straitjacket it’ll do so in a county like Kildare, with its numbers (a population of 186,000 at last count) and its resources and its significant quota of residents from traditional hurling counties. Ditto with Meath (pop 162,000) and even Wicklow (126,000). For an infinity of reasons, not least of them the shallowness of their playing pool, Longford or Leitrim will never bring home the McCarthy Cup, irrespective of whatever shock treatment may be applied. But Kildare, whose current manager lifted the same trophy eight years ago, or Meath or Wicklow might. As an aside, Wicklow remain the only county in Leinster never to have won a provincial football title. Has it occurred to anyone there to speculate upon what exactly would be lost were they to embrace hurling?

And embracing hurling is all the rage in different parts of the world these days. The Milwaukee Hurling Club is 15 years old and has 275 members, very few of them Irish. Wiffle hurling, a hybrid game played with plastic sticks and the invention of a New Yorker called Tom Russotti who studied in UCD in the late 1990s, can be seen in the public parks of Brooklyn at weekends. Article 165 of the Lisbon Treaty created an EU sports policy for the first time and Androulla Vassiliou, the EU health commissioner with responsibility for sport, is anxious to spread indigenous sports to other member states. God forbid Mrs Vassiliou, a Cypriot, ever discovers the extent of the GAA’s failure to spread an indigenous sport to its member counties.

The work goes on here and there as it always has. A combined Wicklow schools team beat Scoil Aireagail from Ballyhale a few weeks back, a milestone in a journey that may have begun the day John Henderson came to live in Bray.

More eyecatchingly, Westmeath colleges, with an outfit drawn from six co-ed schools in the county, floored Dublin South after extra-time in Ballyboden last Monday night to reach the Leinster colleges ‘A’ quarter-final at their first attempt. “Starting the development squads when the lads were in first year was the beginning of it,” the Westmeath manager James McGrath explains. “That helped expose them to a higher standard of hurling.”

Ignore for a moment the school of thought which insists that holding what we have in hurling terms, and hanging onto the Wexfords and the Laoises and the Limericks, is a more pressing and more achievable objective than that of spreading the game to the four winds. Ignore too the fact that, largely as a result of Pat Daly’s wonderful Go Games programme, hurling at juvenile level is played by more children in more places that ever before. Keeping these children involved into adulthood is the biggest challenge the sport faces, and not solely on the playing side either.

When Paul Shortt, the Kildare hurling PRO and a relative newcomer to the county, attends a hurling board meeting there he’s invariably the youngest man in the room by about 25 years. “Nobody is coming through from inside the county with a determination to develop hurling in Kildare and there’s no incentive for clubs to do so either,” he explains. “Kildare hurlers retire and pick up a golf club. Nobody is encouraging them to do otherwise. There’s little point spending money on the game at schools’ level while doing nothing to ensure that structures exist in clubs to keep players hurling through to adult level.”

A snapshot. Way back in 1888 the very first Kildare hurling championship was won by Monasterevin. A century and a bit later, Monasterevin don’t field a hurling team at any level. They’re even registered as the Monasterevin Gaelic Football Club, just in case there was any danger of the GAA expecting them to promote hurling. Look around you and you’ll find Monasterevins everywhere.

Perhaps the very democracy of the Association is the real stumbling block. A more dictatorial organisation would have set about creating a new framework for hurling in the Kildares of this world a long time ago. Imagine any big company launching a new product. An experienced executive or manager at the top. Defined structures. Targets. Timeframes. Accountability. Reach those targets or don’t let the door hit your arse on the way out. Can the GAA afford to adopt such a stance in the name of hurling? More to the point, can they afford not to?

Ask Paudie Butler, the national Director of Hurling, if a football county can be rebooted as a hurling county over the course of a generation and he pauses for thought. “In theory? Yes. In practice? Tradition is still very important.” It is not a question of numbers, he emphasises. There are over 2,000 children of primary school-going age in Dundalk and almost the same number in Drogheda. There may be 200 children of primary school-going age in Portumna. But Portumna is the home of the All Ireland club champions and Dundalk and Drogheda aren’t. And won’t be.

Attractive as it may sound, forcing people to convert at gunpoint is not the answer, Butler adds. “If hurling people were superimposed in a football county, that would immediately cause a major division. The major problem in areas where the game hasn’t taken hold is that there aren’t enough hurling people to drive it. To bring about a change of tradition you’d need very strong, charismatic people to come in and make hurling attractive to everyone.”

A game can be sold, he accepts. Butler lived in Cork in the early 1980s when basketball was all the rage. Or look at rugby in Munster, he says, a successful brand into which tens of thousands of people have gladly bought. Yet sometimes Butler concludes that if he were tasked with creating a hurling identity somewhere, he’d leave Ireland altogether. “Go to India. Choose a city or big town. Pump in resources and personnel. Give it 25 years and you could win an All Ireland.” He is not being facetious.

Twenty-five years? “All this,” a late and still-lamented president of the US declaimed on his inauguration day, "will not be finished in the first 100 days. Neither will it be finished in the first 1,000 days, nor in the life of this administration


“But let us begin.”

New Direction

» Central Council funding for all activities contingent on counties producing and adhering to a five-year hurling plan with measurable targets. Funding to be withdrawn if targets are not met.

» No club to be allowed participate in its county football championship unless it fields an adult hurling team.

» Every county outside the traditional strongholds to field a combined colleges’ team.

» Creation of non-elite development squads in order to raise standards at club level.

» Introduction of development squads at under-19 level to help bridge the gap between second-level schools and the under-21 grade.

» Failing all of the above, get out a penknife.

emcevoy@tribune.ie

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both gga sports are dying - international sports are more popular than rural ones

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Latest from the GAA Congress in Derry.

  • The black card is in.

  • Advantage rule is in for gaelic football.

  • The “mark” in gaelic football defeated.

40

That fuckin black card will be a joke.

They are ruining the game.