Opinion: The Blanket Defence Is Pulling The Wool Over Our Eyes

Picture credit: Matt Browne / SPORTSFILE

Cormac Mullins is a Carlow footballer who takes serious umbrage to the path Gaelic football has embarked on over the last number of years. He has written this piece bemoaning the age of the blanket defence.

Let me start off by saying I don’t like Ulster football, and I never have. When I was younger it was because ‘they’ were ‘up there’- counties and places that I knew very little about.

Now that I’m older, I know a little bit more about the counties and, perhaps unfortunately, a lot more about the football. Ulster football is dreadful, and I have no qualms about saying it. Competitive? Yes. Evenly contested, with players giving their all? Yes. Exciting? If taking the term loosely, I suppose it would have to be a yes.However, is the football of a high enough standard, befitting of senior inter county football teams? Unequivocally, No.

Why? Three words, now synonymous with modern GAA: the blanket defence.

A ‘batton down the hatches’ approach for a full, mind numbing, 70 minutes of football. Something RTE pundit and former Kerry great Pat Spillane once infamously referred to it, ‘puke football’.

Of course, one cannot mention the term blanket defence without the mind instantly wandering to two things, well a man and a county to be more precise, Jim McGuinness and Donegal. A man and a county, both responsible for almost bringing the game into disrepute as they forced an All Ireland football semi-final to a standstill in 2011. Squeezing the life out of a Dublin team in Croke Park, the bastion of Gaelic Games. Dublin eventually emerged as one point winners in a game that finished a measly 0-8 to 0-7.

The crowd booed – the first time I can recall a GAA crowd ever booing at a game for anything other than a disputed call from a match official. If this was a WWE arena one can just imagine the ring being filled with bottles and fruit, and anything else the crowd could get their hands on, to throw at the ‘bad guy’ to demonstrate their disapproval. Jimmy McGuinness orchestrated this team and this tactic just as Vince McMahon orchestrates his ‘good’ and ‘bad’ guys in the wrestling world.

Skip forward two years, to the present day, and this same Donegal team are now All Ireland champions; their critics quietened and their fans seemingly justified. It’s Ulster final day in Clones. Donegal are bidding for their third Ulster title in a row and expected to comfortably beat a Monaghan team who haven’t won an Ulster championship since 1988. Donegal, the All Ireland champions, the best this country has to offer in terms of our national game, score two points in the first half. Two points. Their first score came after 31 minutes ... 31 minutes.

The supposed premier team in this country nearly went a full half of football without registering a point. Why? Monaghan beat them at their own game. Two teams trying to stifle each other. Not to win the game, but to smother the other team into submission and in the process, perhaps as a by product, emerge victorious. This is what football is now reduced to, and its Ulster football’s fault, not just Donegal. It'd didn't start with Jim McGuinness.

Jack O’Connor a former All Ireland winning manager of Kerry, talked at length in his book, Keys to the Kingdom about the northern attitude and the changing face of the game:

'There’s an arrogance to northern football which rubs Kerry people up the wrong way. They’re flash and nouveau riche and full of it....Add up the number of All Ireland titles the counties have won and it’s less than a third of Kerry’s total, but Northern counties advertise themselves well...they build up a mythology about themselves.'

The blanket defence, the tough, no holds barred football image that is peddled by these counties is very much part of this myth. Kerry, to my mind, represent football purity in all its glory. Seeing a Kerry team on form, blowing away the opposition by sheer talent and an unyielding belief that they are simply better than the opposition, is really a sight to behold. This is the same county who boast different players from different generations who defined eras of football and championship summers year in, year out.

Perhaps none more so than Colm ‘Gooch’ Cooper – detectably the best forward to ever play the game – whose skill, guile and panache have dumbfounded the best and tightest markers. His ability to win a ball and evade tackles belie his arguably slight frame. This same player recently came out in a newspaper article bemoaning the state of the modern game, unhappy with the tactics prevalent and the stifling effect it has on the games best players, and more importantly, the fundamental skills of the game. ‘Gooch’ reckons that if he were to start playing now, he would find it hard to make the Kerry squad such is the evolution of the game; which he sees as a game now geared towards big, well built men playing a game of tactical one-upmanship.

As if to say the game is akin to a game of chess, with the players being used as pawns – hindered in their movement – strangled under the conditions of play and a manager’s final word.

Jack O’Connor’s abiding memory of the 2003 All Ireland semi-final – which Kerry lost to Tyrone – is of a Kerry player being surrounded by eight Tyrone players. It is this that prompted a proud Kerry man to abandon his football roots, in search of the methods and new age tackling which the Armaghs and Tyrones brought into the GAA world.

The blanket defence started here and has engulfed the game in a big way, with not just Ulster counties playing this system, but teams from every province in some way shape or form trying to play to their own, ultimately negative, defence minded system. Some teams have gone further and brought in northern managers. Most noticeably in Kildare, Meath (for a brief period) and Laois.

But this defensive system doesn't bring about guaranteed success. It is worth noting than none of these teams have won a Leinster or All Ireland during these spells. Carlow, in Division 4, played an unashamedly negative defensive system this year. The system blatantly didn’t work and Carlow finished in the bottom half of Division 4; two seasons after being in with a chance of promotion on the final day of the league and beating Louth in the championship.

Cavan, some people's surprise package of the 2013 championship, will contest an All Ireland quarter final next weekend having served up some of the worst football seen in many a year, and not having played a team from outside Ulster, bar London. They had two horrible games for any neutral to watch, against a Fermanagh team devoid of anything resembling attacking proficiency and a round three qualifier against Derry.

There are some fantastic, wonderfully talented players in Ulster – as there is in every county. I am not criticising the players. In fact, the commitment, fitness levels, drive and focus required to carry out the blanket defence is an admirable trait in itself. However, its destroying the game. Neutral’s are turning off their television sets and who would blame them?

At underage level, at Cúl Camps up and down the country, the fundamentals of the game are being taught; the essence of the kick pass, the beauty of the high catch, the technique on how to kick a score or take on your marker. How long before these children are being taught the fundamentals of the blanket defence?

Perish the thought.