FOOTBALL/Championship 2004: Tom Humphries looks at some of the key issues that will dominate this season's All-Ireland championship.
Summer and the noise of pounding boots on hard ground. Teeming afternoons in places as far flung as Clones, Killarney and Salthill. Breathless winners and half-vanishing losers who miraculously materialise from the cocoon of the qualifiers, usually in better shape than when we last saw them. Brawls and debates and heartbreaks. Football.
Hurling must be decanted and sniffed at, swilled and swirled and inspected. Hurling has good years and bad years. Vintages. The football championship is beer though. Barrels of it. Its broad cheery demographic ensures it is on tap everywhere, frothy and bubbly and affordable.
An easy intoxication.
It's beer, not wine, but that doesn't make it a generic. Taste is still permissible. The season ahead and the season so recently left behind will be looked at, when perspective allows, as a key time in the evolution of the football. Will we look back and wonder at the crude novelty of the so-called "puke football" or will the game skip on.
First thing that must be said as holders Tyrone prepare to take the field again tomorrow, against Derry, is that to discuss the aesthetics of their game (and that of last year's losing finalists Armagh) is not to diminish or begrudge their achievement. The Northern response to any analysis of style cannot continue to be hot accusations of jealousy. It's possible to be pleased for Tyrone, but not chuffed for the game of football.
We should remember too that teams have no obligation to entertain or to play beautiful football. They owe their audience nothing except commitment. If a side can work out a way of winning an All-Ireland title with the talents they have (and Tyrone have many) then good luck to them.
And, of course, the term "puke football" overstates the case. Tyrone have enough sharp blades in the forward line to make them worth watching even if you are a Derry man or an Armagh man.
Puke football refers to a swamping system of defence which was most evident and most effective in the first half of the All-Ireland semi-final against Kerry last year.
Those passages of play wherein Tyrone just suffocated Kerry were seminal moments. It was Kerry after all, the old catch-and-kick purists, who were suffering the ignominy. As a test drive for a new-style football, they couldn't have chosen a better location or time. Puke football was coined, by a Kerryman, as a sort of tabloid term. It provokes a response and a debate.
As such it's useful.
What is the immediate future for puke football? Will the progenitors of the new game be flattered by a slew of imitators? Or will a counter-puke movement spring up?
Part of the responsibility for that future lies in the hands of the game's legislators and referees of course. Apart from a vigorous blanketing of the man in possession, the so-called puke style involves no little amount of borderline physicality.
Indeed, that celebrated and somewhat hypnotic passage of first-half play under the Hogan Stand last year, where a succession of Kerrymen were pounded into submission by a horde of Tyrone players, could have been stopped at any one of several points for a free to Kerry. Players got dumped after transferring possession and challenges strayed over the line from being enthusiastic to being dangerous.
All teams try to get away with what they think they can get away with. It will be interesting to learn what sort of play referees have a bee in their bonnet about this year.
As for countering the style, Kevin Heffernan, arguably the greatest innovator the game has seen, mentioned in an interview in this newspaper during the spring that he would relish the chance of thinking his way past the challenge on offer.
Heffernan's view, and it is devastatingly logical once you hear it articulated, is that the speedy transfer of the ball will beat the posse-style defence. In other words, if six Tyrone players are to descend on the man in possession they must be leaving five spaces behind them. The onus falls on the man in possession to abstain from solo running and all other sorts of jiggy adornment to his game and do what he is there to do.
Transfer the ball quickly. In its simplicity it is football's equivalent of ground hurling. Keep it moving, even if that means fly-kicking it along or punching rather than catching. Pretty soon you'll be finding forwards in space and the posse will split quicker than a boy band and go back to having solo careers as man markers.
The evidence of a sprightly National League final is that two of the leading Southern contenders intend to counter the new wave rather than embrace it. Kerry in particular must have thought long and hard since last summer about the consequences and possibilities of abandoning their own principles. Instead under Jack O'Connor they appear to have uncorked themselves and taken up a more joyful pattern of play involving plenty of early ball into the full-forward line. When that line has Mike Frank Russell, Johnny Crowley and Colm Cooper, of course the more ball they see the better.
Galway were a little more convoluted in their approach and their Armagh-style two-man full-forward unit and tendency to deploy a big man as a third midfielder make them a little more Northern-influenced without being brainwashed.
In recent years Kerry have had an edge over Galway. That continued last weekend but an encounter at the height of summer would hold much more fascination.
It's an interesting time right now too, not just in terms of whether teams have a new style to choose or to worry about. Seldom in the history of the game has the field been so even before the start of summer.
There is a theory that the demands of the game mean sides have less time at the top. The fact that it is 1990 since a side retained the All-Ireland is offered as proof of this. Yet the evidence could also suggest that teams are lasting longer and that the difficulties of retaining the title have more to do with that levelling of standards.
Of this year's leading contenders, Galway, Armagh, Tyrone and Kerry have seldom been far away from the top table for the best part of the last decade. There have been seasons where one or two of them have looked a little jaded and short of inspiration but that is forgivable. None of their predecessors, who boast a more productive longevity, had to worry about teams like Limerick, Laois, Wexford, Fermanagh, Sligo, Kildare and Roscommon, to name just a few of the counties who have captured big scalps in recent years.
The seasons are getting longer and harder and rather than infer that there are no great teams anymore because nobody retains the title anymore we should draw solace from the fact there is such variety and surprise on offer every summer.
More teams are credible contenders than at any time in football's history. That means more games and more gates.
Sides have less time at the top but are staying around the top equally as long. And that's where the Northern influence will again be instructional. Armagh manager Joe Kernan kept a club side like Crossmaglen viable for half a decade even though with the long campaigns and claustrophobia of club life they should have been at each other's throats by the second season. Similarly he roused Armagh from their natural desire to rest in each of his first two seasons in charge, taking them to two All-Ireland finals.
There's a lesson in there and there's a lesson in Mickey Harte's approach. Harte is a minimalist. A sensible amount of training. No challenge games. Tyrone carry the burden of genuine tragedy and the weight of a heavy winter onto the field tomorrow but if they can look sprightly and retain that bounce through the summer we could see a shift away from the training- seven-days-a-week-at-5.30- a.m.-in-an-ice-house tendency.
Football summers have their own distinctive grammar and syntax and are usually easy to decode. This year though everything is a little scrambled. Who will learn what from the Northern revolution. Whowill counter it? Who will imitate and embellish it?
Who will realise they just don't have the players or commitment to play like Tyrone. Will Tyrone even have the players and commitment to still be themselves?
We've seen puke football. We've enjoyed better but it didn't kill us. We look forward to turning the page and finding out what's next.
