The demand to retain possession will continue to encourage the overuse of the handpass, reports Seán Moran

ANYONE WATCHING the football championship matches on Sunday would have seen further evidence of the evolution into what is now primarily a possession game. Westmeath's massed defence and running movement from the back has been a feature of the Division Two winners' game all season, whereas Dublin similarly built attacks from deep with a succession of handpasses.

Whereas there have been calls to limit the use of the handpass and 13 years ago an experiment conducted in the National Football League prohibiting two successive handpasses in any passage of play, there is little enthusiasm for attempting to regulate the way in which the game is played by changing the rules, as advocated recently by Galway manager Liam Sammon.

Pat Daly, the GAA's head of games, says Croke Park don't have a view on changing playing styles. "There's never been any stated objective or underpinning philosophy saying that we'll protect the primacy of kicking," he says. "It's definitely a more mobile game this decade but there's no less kicking. The most significant change in football came in 1990 when frees and sideline kicks were first taken from the hand.

"But the fundamental reason for that was that some teams had made a habit out of fouling and getting back behind the ball before the kick was taken. That was primarily a disciplinary issue and using the playing rules might have been a crude way to address it."

Gerry McDermott, the football statistician and analyst, says that a game's tactics have to be regulated by their outcome. "Over-passing by the hand or foot will be punished by the opposition or by mistakes," he says. "Reducing the number of handpasses is a matter for coaches not for legislators. The handpass is much more accurate than the foot-pass and that is the reason teams use it.

"There was so much criticism of all the handpassing involved in the Westmeath-Longford Leinster championship game played on May 11th. Longford handpassed the ball 88 times. However, in the All-Ireland final of 1998, Galway handpassed the ball 86 times and I did not hear the media criticising it; in fact Galway were praised for reviving the traditional skills of the game.

"Football always was, and always will, remain essentially a possession game. Get the ball and keep it until you have a shot for a score. Kick it long and high for the sake of kicking it and you will risk losing possession most of the time.

"Gaelic football is a catch-and-keep game and we should not be going back to the dark ages with the old catch-and-kick. Of course there will be many occasions when the long kicked ball is the best method and this should be used when it is the right option. But it has to be emphasised the most important thing for any team is that it retains possession. Possession is hard earned and it is very frustrating to see players giving the ball away rather easily and then leading to a score by the opposing team."

The importance of keeping possession was at the heart of Prof Niall Moyna's presentation at last November's National GAA Coaching Conference, at the Analysis of Gaelic Football 1970-2006 seminar.

One of the assumptions that went by the wayside was that there has been a decline in footpassing. The number of kicked passes in a match has virtually remained unchanged in over 35 years but the number of fist passes has leaped to the extent that from a situation in the 1970s and '80s when there were as many fisted passes as kicked passes, football is now recording a ratio of 3:1 in favour of the fist.

The accuracy of footpasses is considerably (more than 50 per cent) less reliable but in answer to the suggestion that teams simply concentrate even further on handpassing, Moyna pointed out that the kicked pass remains the most potent means of attacking quickly and that targeted coaching is needed to remedy the errors in kicking technique.

According to Pat Daly it is up to the association at large to decide if it wants to change the rules of the game but the evidence is that there's no such impetus.

"Coincidentally the two games on Sunday featured a lot more fist passing (as opposed to handpassing) than usual. A few years ago there was a proposal to restrict handpassing to fist passes only, but it was unsuccessful. If you can't get a simple change like that agreed congress is effectively saying, 'we're happy with the game as it is'."