The minimalist nature of the FRC tweaks didn’t come as any major surprise. To engage in wholesale change would have cast doubt on the whole enterprise and also an admission that the initial proposals had been significantly flawed. Neither was likely to happen – and rightly, given the broad success of the project to date.
One slight surprise is that when Central Council next week - on Monday, brought forward from Thursday - signs off on the proposals, which were approved on Thursday by the GAA’s management committee, it is expected to green-light their introduction for the final two rounds of the league, which will come as a relief for managers preparing for the championship, which is now just weeks away.
Changing such a key provision as the 3v3 to 4v3 – teams must now have four players in defence, including the goalkeeper – might appear a major rethink but it’s an effectively simple way to address the two most problematic lessons of the league to date.
The one provision that went badly askew was permitting teams, who had lost players to disciplinary sanction, to restock their outfield numbers by borrowing from their attack so that the 3v3 became 3v2 or 3v1, enabling 11 team-mates to continue to roam the rest of the pitch.
Ironically, Tyrone manager Malachy O’Rourke, an original member of the FRC, fell foul of it two weeks running in defeats by Mayo and Kerry, both of whom lost players to the sin bin.
“You were thinking that the black card would give us an advantage and it didn’t really,” he stoically observed after losing in Castlebar despite a one-man advantage for 10 minutes.
It was an obvious issue for remedy, as accepted by FRC chair Jim Gavin during the week on RTÉ’s Morning Ireland.
“We have heard what people have said and we have responded to that. There are adjustments, yeah. We have made some recommendations for some adjustments.”
The 4v3 structure will now have to be maintained regardless of how a team is depleted by black or red cards.
This change will also address another challenging situation: the concerns that had developed over the 11v12 overload, facilitated by goalkeepers joining their team’s attacks.
A number of managers had complained that this was unbalancing play, as the attacking side had a numerical advantage. More worryingly, the stubbornly high level of handpassing was partly attributable to goalkeepers providing an additional outlet in attack.
This went contrary to the FRC’s mission statement to rebalance the horizontal direction of play with more vertical attacking because lengthy bouts of handpassing over and across the field were creating a great deal of horizontal play but just switching its location from defence to attack.
Now, teams will have to have four players back so that when the goalkeeper enters the attacking zone, a team-mate will have to drop back to cover him.
Penalties for breaches of the 4v3 structure have also been eased with a provision that inadvertent overstepping the line by a player will be advised rather than penalised as long as it is no farther than four metres beyond the halfway and not impacting on play.
Interestingly, according to the GAA Games Intelligence Unit, breaches of the now modified 3v3 reached a peak in round five of the league of 24 – as opposed to an average of 15.5 for the first four rounds.
There had also arisen aesthetic concerns about the requirement for kick-outs to travel outside the 40-metre arc, which fulfilled the hoped-for wish for more contests but also led to scrappy play.
To address this, any player taking a mark will be able to play on without challenge for four metres, as is the rule governing the solo-and-go facility when frees are awarded.
Finally, it has also been proposed that recommendations from the CCCC on the ending of matches be adopted so that when the hooter sounds at the conclusion of a match, the ball must go dead or frees, penalties and 45s already awarded must be taken before the final whistle is sounded.
