I personally donât think gaelic football can be salvaged, despite these current efforts. Once you lose the hearts & minds of the people, allied with trends moving on, itâs very difficult to recover lost ground even when you scramble around trying to make things relevant again. Iâd point to the example of things like conkers, space hoppers & snooker where theyâre still used/played but only as a niche activity in small geographical pockets. There has been a multitude of factors converging to get us here:
Gaelic football was meant to be based on contests & wan on wan battles. It was to be enjoyed mainly by rural people of below average intelligence who would go out, run around & belt each other for an hour. But Twitter coaches have over-engineered things & devised tactics focused on risk averse, defensive & possession without penetration football, thus removing the main selling points. Muldoons canât think on their feet or go against instructions so they robotically follow the game plan. The game has become rubby without the collisions, as teams line up in their own half & fist pass the ball around sideways & backwards.
The pandemic saw people take stock of their lives, careers & hobbies in ways they hadnât before. They started to deeply analyse what they were doing & where they were spending their money. People woke up & stopped just following pursuits because of tradition or accessibility. People are now being more selective & have realised that Gaelic football is diabolical stuff.
The awful stewardship of the association in recent years & disastrous decision making & communication. The split season was the GAA themselves deciding to make their games largely irrelevant to the wider public and nobody really cares any more.
Dublinâs dominance was the biggest issue in the game at inter-county level during the period from 2013-2020. Thankfully that suffocating dominance seems to be on the wane but itâs kind of ironic that the manager who instigated said period is now in charge of rectifying Gaelic footballâs current malaise. The blanket defence emergence in 2011 certainly didnât help but the game felt much better before 2010 because it was so much more competitive across all provinces and at all levels.
Iâd argue that the blanket defence most debilitating effect is at club level where coaches on the âcoaching circuitâ introduce negative defensive systems while pocketing upwards of âŹ100 per session. The funny part is that most club teams would perform better with an off the cuff approach with rudimentary tactics.
+1. Thereâll be at least 2 (two) more unhappy players on every club panel across the country. Would they still allow 5 subs even? Plus there wouldnât be sufficient peripheral players to power a 3rd team (or 4th team in bigger areas) by two players being cut from senior/intermediate and junior A/B. It would be a nightmare for lads on the cusp of starting on a team.
It has happened at underage levels in smaller rural clubs mind you.
2003 perhaps and Tyroneâs swarm defence? There were some tremendous championships in the early 00âs when weâd have first started following GAA. The 90âs seemed like a tremendous period too. A pity the gulf grew between the haves and have nots in the meantime.
Additional arcs, at least one of which looks like it needed a second go with the protractor, morse code or something across centrefield, and lingering rugby lines.
