TONY HANAHOE will frown but lodged in the memory is a moment from a game in the mid 70s. Jimmy Keaveney of Dublin has the ball in his hand some 40 yards from goal. He is facing the Hill 16 end. With a little shake of his ample hips he has sent two defenders the wrong way. Jimmy glances up and with a casual stabbing motion he drop kicks the ball languidly, using the outside of his foot to send it spinning in a high and unlikely arc towards the empty space on the left side of the opposition penalty area. There is such knowing arrogance and cool precision in the kick that one senses that something wondrous will consummate its promise.
So it is. From nowhere Tony Hanahoe materialises, with a defender flailing a yard or two behind. The mind anticipates. Hanahoe has just to catch and he will break the rigging of the net with his shot.
Hanahoe's mind anticipates too. He windmills his arm and sends the ball flashing goalwards with his fist. It goes over the bar for a point. Croke Park erupts.
You don't see things like that too often anymore, players making the optimum use of time and space. You don't see great, great games of football anymore. Unless you are easily pleased, the game hardly formed any part of this year's All Ireland senior football championship. Or last year's.
There are cases to be made for matches in other grades. A fine under 21 final in Thurles last week. An excellent schools final earlier in the year. A handful of memorable club no merits in the last few years.
Maybe the last great game was that between Down and Derry in Celtic Park on a sunny day at the start of the 1994 Ulster football championship. A game with a great rivalry as its context, an afternoon of blood and thunder, a twisting narrative and some sublime skills. As a whole, the four match series between Meath and Dublin in 1991 might qualify on the basis of its memorable, short term social impact and its atmosphere of mounting excitement.
Those then are the thin scattering of afternoons of pleasing diversion in a long litany of footballing disappointments.
If football is going through another non vintage year, then the harvest is made more vinegary by the sweet quality which flows these days from the well stocked vineyards of hurling. What's wrong with football? "We have to be balanced about this," stresses Tony Hanahoe, who has spent many long evenings sitting on committees considering the state of the game. "I wouldn't like to give the impression that the standard, has declined in 20 years. There are positives, before we get to the negatives. There are more counties in with a chance of winning, more players and teams willing to make the sacrifice necessary and, take, the steps to win. Both codes have benefited in that way.
"There are still good games, there are players making high catches, and plenty of attractive elements. As a matter of principle however, I would be in favour of experimenting with the rules of, the game at some level or grade every year.
As spectacles, the qualitive differences between football and hurling are more, than just illusory. Hurling is trailed as a joyful atavistic expression of our native culture. Football, well, roll up folks for live coverage of the pullers and draggers' big day out.
Hurling thrives under the munificence and imagination of a new sponsor and is benefiting from a new sense of egalitarianism. All things are suddenly possible. Football looks dowdy by comparison.
Hurling has been blessed with great games, charismatic personalities and good stories. Through Guinness's creative media approach and the happenstance of having, in place a positive thinking series of leading characters, hurling has earned an extraordinarily good press in the past couple of years. Compare and contrast the open, positive thinking ministrations of Ger Loughnane and Liam Griffin, with the empires of paranoia and disinformation presided, over by several leading football managers in the past few years.
The difference in approach between the sponsors of the two codes is worth noting too. Guinness - blessed admittedly, by having Clare and Wexford win the first two sponsored All Irelands - have played their part in marketing the game and promoting its fixtures. They have had a surer touch with the media and a more imaginative feel for selling the elemental Soul of the game, than their football counterparts, Bank of Ireland.
The game has wasted opportunities too. The best news Gaelic football had in quite some time was the emergence of Jason Sherlock. Scoring great goals, kissing referees, winding up fans, dominating the media, Sherlock was a tonic for the game. Where Jason Sherlock now? Plying his trade in the privacy of League of Ireland grounds, denied a deserved All Star award last year by grudging colleagues and misused this summer by a struggling Dublin management team.
On a macro level, Tony Hanahoe feels that football has perhaps suffered more than was at first evident from the decline in traditional coaching structures: "There was a time when christian brothers had battalions of little fellows out on fields every day of the week. They grounded them in the skills. The GAA have lost their grasp on the secondary schools in terms of skills training and clubs have been slow to adapt. What happened years ago was that the brothers and clergy did all the training. They handed over perfectly trained 13 year olds to clubs, the clubs handed them to the county, the county won an All Ireland and everybody said we must be doing a great job. Now the root is problematical - so the rest is problematical.
"I would love to see a lot of younger people taking more of an active administrative role in the whole thing instead of these "sweaty old fellas with last year's suit, on and the five or six tickets for Sunday in their pocket and in on every committee that's possible and interested in nothing but the maintenance of their own position." Down's Peter McGrath, the most successful football manager of the decade with two All Ireland titles to his credit, feels that the fortunes of any sport are cyclical and football is suffering a regressive period. "The last two championships haven't in aspired. You would be hard pressed to think of great team performances or great games.
It's probably unfair to hold individual matches up against our game with Derry in 1994, but since then, most of the football has been a little disappointing. I saw every match in Ulster this year and there was a lot of mundane football, a lot of effort but very little inspiration.
"It depends on what you are looking for in a game though. If you are the manager of a competing team and they have the ball, you don't want your players to do anything risky. As such the game has become shorter by nature. It has taken some of the flair out of the game but as the stakes get higher that's predictable. If you eliminate mistakes you make the game shorter." Too much possession play? Poorly defined tackle? Bad marketing? Natural cycle? Where has football currently gone, wrong? Are the rules failing? Do the game's structures need alteration, are, there too many very fit players participating in a man to man marking game in a confined, space? Discipline and presentation is a factor. What, made the All Ireland hurling final a fortnight ago novel (apart from the outcome) was the sending off of Eamon Scallan. What would make the football final strange would be the absence of a sending off. As football evolves into a possession game, so teams draw the strings tighter around their opponents. Scallan's dismissal was the first in an All Ireland hurling final in 35 years. The list of football final dismissals stretches the length of a referee's outstretched arm.
The dismissals themselves are merely the symptoms of a broader malaise. Football is congested, riddled with puller and draggers. A couple of years ago a certain inter county manager mused quietly before an All Ireland final about removing the stitching from the shirts of a couple of his players, so that they would be ripped apart in the opening minutes, thus focussing the referee's attention on a critical problem.
Pat Daly, development officer in Croke Park and one of the great thinkers about the state of the games, feels that with regard to discipline the association needs to take the bull by the horns and divorce club and county, so that clubs don't lose out if their players offend in inter county games and vice versa.
"We need a system of cumulative bookings leading to suspension. If you are booked twice or three times then you should miss a game or games at that level. If a guy can get away with it, as he can at the moment, it is reinforcement for negative behaviour.
Indeed. The game is all too tolerant of the recidivist offenders who smudge out the big name talent. Young Mark O'Reilly, Meath's talented new corner back, was booked in the Leinster final and booked again in the All Ireland semi final. He might have had a different afternoon the second day in Croke Park, had his final appearance hinged on not getting booked.
O'Reilly is tight and tough. He might well argue that there are few other ways a defender, especially a corner back, can be these days.
The difficulty lies in how Gaelic football has evolved in recent decades. From the Antrim team of the 40s, through to the Down and Galway teams of the 60s, football has been moving away from being a ball propulsion game to being a ball possession game. Back in the days of the crude third person tackle, Ant rim famously learned the hard way against Kerry of just how limited the short game could be. Down brought fitness levels and support play a stage further in the 60s and Kerry in particular, suffered some northern retribution.
The third man tackle, disappeared in the 70s however and while nobody would mourn its passing, with it went a rudimentary control of the nature of the game. In the old days, a forward would approach a defender at pace, get flattened and think twice about repeating that act, of impudence.
Today the defender is legally constrained and is in a state of high anxiety when a forward comes at him. He does those things he was told to do since he was seven years old. He stays on his toes, he keeps going backwards he stays in front of his man. Alas he knows it's doomed. He can't plan simultaneously for bending to block a kicked ball or leaping to bat down a handpass flicked over his head. He goes backward, hopes to push the man wide, away from the goal, paws and bats at the ball. He does that or he plays the percentages and fouls. Pat Daly points out that the game exists in a "tension balance between player, rules and referee. It any one of those three isn't doing what it should be doing the game suffers. If players won't play properly. If referees won't apply the rules properly and consistently. If the rules don't ensure the safety of players or don't ensure that the more skilful players win out, then the game is in trouble." Daly is fully aware that Gaelic football seems permanantly to be in a state of crisis. He points out that even during the imagined golden eras of the game, there were complaints about where the game was going and what could be done to get it back on track. Yet, for all the discontent when it comes to changing the game or experimenting with rule alterations, Croke Park will always come up against the innate conservatism of GAA players.
"People don't like rule changes. A few years ago we experimented in the national league with limiting the handpass. People killed off that rule even before it had a chance.
Tony Hanahoe agrees that there is a traditional reluctance to tamper with the game, but argues that experimentation, is always worthwhile and often beneficial in the long term: "There have been positive changes. The fouled player being allowed take the free kick from his hand is a useful rule, a colleague being entitled to take the kick is very positive. It operates in favour of the offended for a change." In counties where handpassing is a tribal addiction, the powers that be were accused of deliberately stymying inevitable progress a couple of years ago. Yet Donegal, who might have been hit hardest by the rule change and certainly complained loudest, actually reached the final of that league competition, varying their intricate short game and hitting the full forward line earlier than ever before.
"People didn't like that rule," says Daly, "but I thought it worked in that it handed the defender another method of dispossessing the forward. Count the number of blocked, kicks in Croke Park this Sunday, there will the very few because the dice are loaded against the defender." Tony Hanahoe concurs that a limit on the use of the handpass within a particular move, might favourably alter the complexion of the game but doesn't feel that the game should be rushed towards major over haul on the evidence of a lacklustre season or so.
Limiting the stringing together of handpasses seems like a good idea but I am wary of major rule changes which involve adjusting a whole series of elements within the game. If we eliminate the handpass altogether and force people into kicking, we artificially eliminate the possession element and we tactically denude football. Within five years people will complain about how primitive Gaelic football is." The emphasis on better use of time and space is one which Pat Daly is very keen on. The less time that a player uses, the more space there is available. That's a simple trade off. There is a current preoccupation with retaining the ball, retaining possession to the detriment of the broader game.
Hurling is a game still based on propulsion of the ball, on the delicate balance between expenditure of time and acquisition of space. With tampering, Gaelic Football can be such a game, but how and where to intervene is a moot point.
The tackle concerns everyone involved with the game. Pete McGrath would add his voice to the long established chorus for at least a consistent approach to the tackle and at best a major redefinition. With 28 players in close proximity there is a lot of scrummaging.
There are days when the referee sees no offences and days when the ref blows everything. Other things which I would look at are the square ball rule which seems to me to be antiquated. Protection of the goalie was necessary years ago, now I think it is less so.
Thirdly I would allow the pick from the ground. It doesn't seem to me that the way we pick the ball up at the moment involves any great skill. It just leaves a player vulnerable and slows things down." Other elements are worth considering. Tony Hanahoe feels that a 13 a side version of the game would relieve a lot of congestion without making the tactical element more crude.
The GAA's next experiment takes place at junior level, where next year will see junior provincial club champions experiment with a game where carrying the ball is limited to one solo run and one hop, where the square ball rule is absent and where players are allowed pick the ball from the ground.
The difficulty with all rule changes is the subsequent abuse of them. Tomorrow in Croke Park, every time a quick free from the hands is possible, an opposing player will present himself to stand in front of the kicker. Back to the drawing board on that one.
On the broader level, the coaching and training efforts have been stepped up albeit belatedly. The battle is slowly being taken into secondary schools. The GAA is among the first sports organisations in Europe to put training lessons on CD Rom.
"We have a coach education logo," says Pat Daly, "consisting of six retreating footballs and a sliotar at front. The message is that most work should be done with the ball." Football needs a good or a great game tomorrow. The season has been short of novelty and beauty, long on dour pragmatism, a reflection of the current state of the game.
