On Friday of last week, Fintan Barrett set about his work in the new St Conleth’s Park in Newbridge. The cold was coming in and there was going to be a pitch inspection before the challenge game against Galway the following night but he wasn’t going to sit around waiting for it. The time had come to put the new lines down.
“You know the wheels that engineers use for measuring?” he says. “You take one of those, you go underneath the black spot in the goal and you walk out in a straight line for 40 metres. You get your bit of string and you mark the 40 metres and then you go left and right in an arc with it. Then you go around with the roller and you join the dots.”
There are somewhere in the region of 3,200 GAA pitches nationwide. The majority of them are in clubs but some are in centres of excellence, some are in schools and colleges and some are just patches of grass in local parks. All of them are going to need to be freshly lined in the coming months with a new 40-metre arc at both ends and a new broken line across halfway.
In a briefing on the Friday before Christmas, the Football Review Committee (FRC) confirmed that the new rules are coming into effect at all levels, club and county, down as far as the under-14 grade. The deadline for counties to have their pitches in order is March 31st, although there is scope for younger grades to dispense with the arc or modify it if goalkeepers are struggling to get kick-outs beyond it. Even so, three months is a tight timeline.
It’s a big job and it’s a small job. Big in the sense that every field in the country effectively has 12 weeks to oversee the first changes to GAA pitch markings since the small arc appeared in 1995. Small in the sense that the work will be carried out by hundreds of one-man bands like Fintan Barrett in Newbridge.
With the exception of a few tournament games in Meath before Christmas, these first weekends of 2025 are the starting gun for ground staff all over the country. The task of giving them all the proper guidance is a likely to be a tough one for Croke Park to adequately measure up to. One groundsman The Irish Times spoke to last week said there has been no contact whatsoever from HQ since the rules came in.
While that may be true in his specific case, it’s not for the want of trying on the FRC’s part. Every county was issued with an infographic laying out the new pitch markings in mid-December. Stuart Wilson, the head groundsman in Croke Park, has been conducting provincial pitch maintenance roadshows around the country over the winter and without fail, questions around the new pitch markings have come up each time.
[ GAA Congress approves Gaelic football’s new rules for 2025Opens in new window ]
Over the coming weeks, the GAA plans to circulate a video explainer and a practical demonstration of the new markings to clubs and counties. There’s a lot to do and it will probably be messy in the beginning.
For example, another groundsman we spoke to said he did the halfway line by painting a three-metre line every three metres – the official guidance says one 10-metre line in the middle and five-metre lines at five metre intervals out to each sideline from there. Ultimately, it’s going to carried out by one-man armies of bundled-up ground staff out in the cold, quietly changing the face of the game to accommodate the new rules. Everybody has their own way of doing it.
“What I do is I attach the tape to my right foot when the grass is wet,” says Phil Heneghan, groundsman in MacHale Park in Castlebar where Mayo played Monaghan last Saturday. “I start by measuring 40 metres out from the centre of the goal and I anchor it there and with the tape pulled tight against my foot, I make a mark in the grass as I go along.
“And then I come back with the machine and I follow that mark. I’m normally on my own. If I have someone helping me, I get them to walk in front of me and I follow them. But you can do it just as well on your own. I measured the full arc afterwards – it’s 68 metres in length.
“Croke Park have sent us out a bulletin to give us a sense of what the measurements should be. You get plenty of experts coming out to walk it when you have a game on and they’ll be telling you it’s too big or too small. But we do it by the book and we know how to do it.”
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