Let’s talk tactics, baybee. Let’s talk negativity. Let’s talk about all the good things and the bad things that may be. Get in out of the sun and run yourself a nice, cold bath. We’re going deep with this one.
The football championship has gone through the summer stuck in neutral. More games than ever, fewer of them with consequences. Armagh play Galway this weekend in their seventh game since Easter and even if they post their third defeat, they’re highly unlikely to exit the stage. Kildare can conceivably lose their third game in four against Roscommon and still go through on the back of a single draw against Division Four Sligo. Check out of this championship any time you like, you’ll still find it hard to leave.
The three most exciting games of the summer so far – Tyrone v Monaghan, Derry v Armagh and Kerry v Mayo – were all thunderous in the moment but had the shelf-life of a bread roll. Win or lose, everyone involved was over it by the time they got back on the bus. Nobody’s year was crocked by defeat and so nobody’s day was ruined.
If you have 10 weeks of all comings and no goings, you don’t leave the people an awful lot to talk about. As a result, the majority of chat around the football championship has centred on the apocalyptic misery of the fare on show. The reviews have not been kind.
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So let’s talk about that. Let’s dig into how the game is being played at the top level in 2023. Gavin Devlin and Kieran Donaghy will be our guides. Devlin is Mickey Harte’s right-hand man in Louth, having played and coached in the Tyrone set-up for most of the past two decades. Across the past six seasons, Donaghy has been a player, a pundit and, since 2020, a part of Kieran McGeeney’s brains trust in Armagh. Between them, they’ve seen it all, from every side.
“I think most teams are playing the same way,” Donaghy said at a Virgin Media gig during the week. “I think you probably have 14 back with most teams now, leaving that one up for the counterattack. When you win and you execute, everybody’s okay with it. When you don’t win and you don’t execute, people aren’t okay with it.
“It’s just the way the modern game has gone. You have athletes all over the pitch now. You have to be able to track players. Corner backs want to go up and score. So does the corner forward stay above and let his man score and next thing we’re taking him off and telling him he should have gone with his man? No, he tracks back.
“It’s changed dramatically in the last five years since I played. I remember playing against Mayo in 2018 and it was starting to happen that all the backs were bombing. Everybody bombing when they got the ball. And you were going, ‘Jesus, I better follow this guy.’ And then they’d switch different men on to me and they’d go bombing on as well. And I was like, ‘Okay, time to retire. I’m not going to be able to track players all over the country at 35 years of age.’”
In all state-of-the-nation conversations, the aerobic capacity of the players is one of the first reference points. It’s no longer the preserve of just Dublin, Kerry and Mayo to have a squad of players who can keep driving on when the needle has gone into the red. Everyone you talk to says that whatever gap was there five years ago just doesn’t exist now among the top 10 teams.
The upshot is that more teams have an ability to ferry more players up and down the pitch more often than before. Teams were always able to put 14 men behind the ball when they didn’t have it. Now they’re able to push 15 into attack when they do – in some cases including the goalkeeper – in the knowledge that nobody is going to be stranded when the time comes to chase back. Hence you have repeated periods of games where you find 30 players in one half of the pitch.
But there’s obviously more to it as well. What gets forgotten in all the moaning is that teams have a very good reason for defending en masse. For all the giving out and complaining, the second reference point in these conversations is generally about how skilful modern players are. And how impossible they are to stop.
Massed ranks of incredibly athletic players facing off against each other, waiting for the hole to appear, biding their time until an incision can be made. Possession is ten-tenths of the law
“The level of conditioning is through the roof,” says Devlin. “The level of athleticism is through the roof. The tactical awareness is through the roof. And at the same time, the ability of a defender to be a physical presence has been lowered over the years. Nobody can accurately define a tackle for me but everyone can agree that over the years, you get away with less and less in terms of physical engagement.
“So given all that, let’s say Con O’Callaghan receives the ball in front of the Hogan Stand, one-on-one with his marker. Think of the best defenders in the game from when we were growing up. Could Kieran McKeever survive one-on-one against Con O’Callaghan in that scenario? Could Seán Marty Lockhart?
“The onus on you as a coach is not to put your defender in that situation. You do that by trying to control the space when you don’t have the ball. We’re playing Kerry on Sunday. Are we going to give David Clifford the space to collect the ball one-on-one early in the game? Why would we?
“Our job is to make our team the best version of themselves they can be. It’s to make Louth competitive against the Kingdom. The question I would ask is when you don’t have the ball, what do people want you to do? Making it awkward for the opposition is what you’re there for.”
Devlin and Mickey Harte took over in Louth at the end of the 2020 season. In that pandemic championship, Louth had gone out in the first round to Longford. In 2019, they went down by eight points to Antrim. Their 2018 championship ended with a 10-point beating from Leitrim.
This is where Louth were when Harte and Devlin came in. No part of them feels the need to apologise for where they are now. Louth bring everybody back, they delete space, they look to keep the ball in transition. It got them to the verge of Division One football this spring, into a Leinster final and now facing a glamour tie against Kerry to stay alive in the championship. You want to fit them for a black hat? Fine. But they’ll defend themselves on that score too.
“I don’t agree with the narrative that says defending in a low block is negative football,” Devlin says. “Think about it – you are giving the other team your half of the pitch. If you’re going to do that, you better be good at it. Playing the game in your own half comes with a lot of risk. And it comes with the imperative that you must be aggressive once you turn the ball over.
“Look at the way Derry attack, look at how they get men ahead of the ball. You can’t call that negative football. But the key to it is they start off in a low block and then break out as a collective. There is nothing easy or straightforward about playing that way. You have to be clever on the ball and always aware of where the space is. The team with the most possession won’t always win the game but they’ll be the one with the most chips at the poker table.”
Ultimately, that’s what the game comes down to, at least in 2023. Massed ranks of incredibly athletic players facing off against each other, waiting for the hole to appear, biding their time until an incision can be made. Possession is ten-tenths of the law. If the authorities want to bring in rule changes to mould the game, they can do so. But they won’t make teams kick the ball away.
“People talk about rule changes,” Devlin says. “It’s so important that whoever is making rule changes come up with the right decisions. There was a move a couple of years ago to bring in a rule that said all sideline balls had to be kicked forward. But all that does is encourage defensive play. If you know I have to kick the ball into a certain area, you are going to flood that area. It’s only common sense.
“Take the attacking mark. The criticism you hear most of the time about the attacking mark is that it’s a cheap way of getting a score. But actually, if you were to really sit down and analyse all the games since the mark came in, the real knock-on effect has been on defensive play. Far more so than on attacking play.
“Every team now sets out to delete the space in front of the attacker. Whereas before, you really wanted to delete the space in behind because if a good forward got the ball in that space, there was a goal on. But most forwards are thinking ‘mark’ instead of ‘goal’ now so you delete the space in front of him. Has that improved attacking play? I don’t think it has.”
What will, in that case? Will anything? Are we to sit, mute, in Beckettian torpor, waiting for a change that never comes? Not so, according to Donaghy.
“It’s constantly evolving,” says the former Footballer of the Year. “And it will evolve more. There will be other things that will come in the coming year or two. I don’t think we need to bring in a lot of rules changes to fix it. I think the game is constantly evolving and that’s the way it should be.
“There will be people who will work on kicking the ball longer, who will work on that technique. Maybe work on being more risky on restarts. The game will certainly evolve, that’s one thing for sure. Teams will spend long winters trying to see what they can do better to break this down. How you counter better to punish teams who are bringing 14 into attack, how you do a better job defensively, that will all evolve for sure.”
It’s a view supported by Devlin. As they went to training this week, the Louth players were relishing the challenge, mad to attack the very idea of playing Kerry on a neutral pitch with everything up for grabs. This has been a career summer for most of them and they don’t want it to end this weekend. Don’t imagine for a second that they’re holding their nose while doing it.
“There’s a clock in my livingroom and it only ticks in one direction,” Devlin says. “It never goes backwards. That’s the way the game goes. It evolves every year. It evolves even within a year. Go back 20 years to when we were playing in 2003 and the big thing was an extra defender standing on the D to cut out the diagonal ball. There was a lot of giving out about that back then even. But the game keeps moving and it’s never going back.”
