Few things in Irish history have been diagnosed as Gaelic football. The sport as a spectacle is constantly seen as being in crisis following the proliferation of a successful tactic, and folk respond in their droves with solutions.
The latest to do so is former Dublin goalkeeper John O'Leary. O'Leary spoke to The Irish Sun of his disillusion with the sport, blaming the sport's obsession with defensive systems for becoming "muck" to watch. He sees the short kick-out as the cause of these problems, and has offered "one simple solution" as a panacea to the game's ills:
All kick-outs should cross the 45-metre line. That would instantly get rid of all this stuff of ten-yard kick-outs and building from the goals out. That’s all it would take, one simple rule change.
There’s no contest at the moment in taking a ten-yard pass off your goalkeeper. But if you put that rule in, you’d turn it into a contest again. You’d have a lot less of 15 men starting their attack from yard one on the pitch.
The odd time the ball mightn’t cross the 45 from the kick-out. In that case, I’d have a throw-in on the 45. I’d love to see it addressed because what we have at the moment is teams playing the least risky way they can.
They’re trying to hold possession as long as possible and it’s awful to watch.
These ten-yard kick-outs! I described it as a cross between watching rugby league and Barcelona. The ball spends more time going backwards and sideways than forwards.
O'Leary compared the game extremely unfavorably to the game across the water, saying that "it’s a bit like being at a Premier League game in England — you find a few minutes have passed and you’ve been looking down at the match programme and nothing’s happened".
It is an interesting idea. While it may improve the optics of the sport, it might also make it more competitive, as among the counties who would be most affected by the rule would be Dublin, with Stephen Cluxton among the sport's finest proponents of the short kick-out.
Last month, O'Leary rejected the idea that Dublin's dominance of Leinster was down to their added financial muscle, instead blaming the other counties in Leinster for not being competitive, saying that "Dublin still had a big population when they weren't winning anything".
[Hogan Stand]
