Ciarán Murphy: Reluctant Rebels pay a heavy price for their timidity

Two of last week’s All-Ireland football preliminary quarter-finals came down to the last minute with the teams level, or with a point between them. This should be the dream scenario in sport – the result still uncertain until the very end. How teams navigate these situations now defines entire seasons.

It was ever thus, in sport. The player who kicks six points in the opening 65 minutes, and then misses the chance three minutes into injury-time, won’t need to be told which contribution will last longer in the memory. But there is a mode of thought in Gaelic football now which is tyrannical. The boring thing to do is more often than not the correct thing.

Teams will be able to produce data which says that if you hold on to the ball for long enough, a chance will appear. And you will take 60 per cent of those chances, or whatever, and so that’s what should happen. And I can’t really argue with it. Possession is nine tenths of the law, and all that.

But watching Cork in Inniskeen on Sunday afternoon would have shortened your life. With 66 minutes and 10 seconds gone, they won a free. Brian Hurley kicked it back towards his own goal and 20 seconds later the hand went up from Cork’s Daniel O’Mahony to tell the entire team – let’s just slow this thing down.

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That’s with 3½ minutes of ordinary time to go, for a team that had scored 1-8 all day. That’s a lot of faith to show in your forward line. Then nothing happened for a minute. Then Cork got trapped in their own No 13 position, they won a 45, and that went backwards. A minute later Matty Taylor takes a ball along the sideline, a tackle comes in but Cork win the lineball. Hurley steps out on to the pitch as he’s taking it, and gets blown up for it. Cork win the throw-in, and win a free. That free goes backwards, with five seconds left of ordinary time.

Five seconds into injury-time, the arm goes up again from O’Mahony. There follows a series of handpasses, none of them forward, all of them three yards backwards. This inexorably leads them back to their goalkeeper, eating another minute from the clock.

The ‘plan’ then boils down to this – ask the one player on the team who isn’t an intercounty standard kick-passer, athlete or point scorer (the goalkeeper) to run up the field, pick out a forward pass, and actually try to find the winning score.

Christopher Kelly tries and fails to find Kevin Flahive. He gets turned over after 71 minutes and 40 seconds, and literally 10 seconds later Louth’s Craig Lennon is 25 yards out from the Cork goal, 10 yards from the centre of the pitch, where he is fouled, and from where Sam Mulroy kicks the winning score.

Cork won possession at 66:10. They had a 45 and a lineball. They won a throw-in. They lost the ball at 71:40. At no stage in that 5½ minutes did any of their players even touch the ball in even the most generous, expanded, Colin Corkery-devised scoring zone. Louth had the ball for 10 seconds and got the score that won the game.

The previous day, Mayo failed for a third game in a row to manage injury-time ‘correctly’. It would be very easy to say Mayo fouled up on Saturday evening, that it was a sign of tactical naivety. But 20 seconds into injury-time, they won a turnover by tackling the player in possession 20 metres out from their own goal, in the right corner back position.

They moved the ball up the field to try to work a score before an injury to Diarmuid Baker stopped the play. They got an indirect free to restart the game after that about 60 metres out from their own goal, with Ryan O’Donoghue on it.

He kicked the ball forward 30 metres to a forward who had made a run that looked like he actually wanted the ball, as opposed to just occupying a defender. Cillian O’Connor might have had a half-second to take a shot on with his left, but passed it sideways. Mayo went back outside the 45, before probing the other wing. There, Sam Callinan saw a match-up he liked, took his man on, took the ball in to within 10 metres of the goal . . . and fisted the ball wide.

It was a failure of skill execution. It wasn’t a failure of character, or a tactical failure. Mayo kept playing to try to kill the game, and one of their players missed an easy chance to do exactly that. Their tactical failure was being too passive in defence after that, not offensively.

Tomo Culhane missed a similar chance against Armagh, which ended up costing Galway top spot in their group, and in its way led to their meeting with Dublin this weekend. But the chance was on! Are Callinan and Culhane the bad guys, or are they actually just footballers who decided to keep playing football in the last five minutes.

These should be the moments when the shackles are off, when we get all the wildness and the unpredictability that we all crave. The chips are all on the table, so why are some teams not even placing a bet?