Hard for neutrals to care as football gets stuck in the system

In the semi-finals Donegal’s much-referenced system derailed a Dublin team regarded as shoo-ins for back-to-back All-Irelands and made the winners clear favourites for the final.

In so doing, McGuinness marked Kerry's cards and for Sunday's All-Ireland final Eamonn Fitzmaurice set up a mirror-image system to crowd the middle of the field, left vacant by Dublin while they all queued up for scores higher up the pitch.

So runs the narrative but there was more to Sunday than a particular system being wielded like a bludgeon by two teams until one of them emerged victorious from the wreckage.

This newspaper's football analyst John O'Keeffe made a number of prescient points in his preview; significantly he identified the system itself as a weakness because unlike Donegal, Kerry would play more heads-up football.

This didn’t make itself apparent necessarily in the creative range of Kerry’s play – there were too many wides and poor shot selections for that to be the case – but it was obvious in how individual players did their best to influence the outcome regardless of the circumstances.

Chasing matches

Donegal, as seen three years ago in the Dublin semi-final, aren’t great at chasing matches in the second half and they spent all of Sunday in at times unconvincing pursuit, still tentative until the very end about going all out for a score even when the match was draining away.

They continued to stand off in the dying minutes as Kerry played keep-ball, maybe tired by their exertions or demoralised by the course of events or simply clinging to the template that they knew best.

Kerry's players, impressively for young and inexperienced footballers, showed infinitely more patience and awareness, at one stage in the second half stringing together 17 passes while looking for an opening – though in the end Donnchadh Walsh fired wide.

For all the talk of systems though not everything is as controllable as managers would wish. Even in the semi-final Donegal's first goal against Dublin came from a defensive lapse when Michael Fitzsimons was dispossessed after winning a loose ball in front of his goal.

Then in the final, despite all the micro-planning the decisive score came from another error, Paul Durcan's misplaced kick-out at the end of the third quarter set up Kieran Donaghy for a goal.

The woodwork

Ultimately Kerry had gone head to head with the defensive system and greatly restricted Donegal in comparison to the semi-final but it still took something out of the blue to settle the match as well as the intervention of the woodwork in the last passage of play to prevent a replay.

Counties are entitled to win All-Irelands as they see fit. It’s an amateur game with no broader responsibility to the public to entertain by the choice of more exciting styles of play. For the most part the winning county doesn’t care once the All-Ireland is won.

As a result there has been a spiralling upwards of ‘doing what it takes’ to win All-Irelands. Fitzmaurice had to explain last year in an open letter why he was shutting the public out of training sessions. In Kerry it had been one of the great traditions that crowds would attend training to see how things were progressing.

“The information that such scouting provides can make a difference,” he wrote. “The new arrangements are designed to provide our players with the privacy and space to develop and improve over the coming months.”

In the ambient paranoia that now surrounds top county teams it was almost unsurprising last week, that Kerry officials were able to shake a tree at Fitzgerald Stadium and dislodge a putative spy.

Donegal ‘named’ a side on Saturday lunchtime barely 24 hours in advance and still made two changes before the throw-in, not even informing Croke Park whose stadium announcer called out the bogus team as players warmed up. Kerry named their 15 on Thursday night and it started as selected.

Such things are harmless enough but clubs in Donegal have also been asked to ice their county championships in order to clear the decks for the county team. Two years ago after the All-Ireland made its way north-west, there were few complaints and the community obviously valued inter-county success above the basic entitlements of club players.

Other counties have done the same. Only last year Dublin CEO John Costello had this to say in his annual report. "While Dublin have achieved great success in recent years at inter-county level in both hurling and football, to some degree it has come at a cost to the club game and club players. In recent years, the inter-county calendar has dictated when we play our local championships."

Blind eye

If elite counties are able to turn a blind eye to what happens to Gaelic games in their own locality they certainly aren’t going to feel any requirement to entertain or be popular.

Sunday’s match was a poor spectacle by any objective criteria: low scoring and poor finishing gave rise to one spell lasting most of the third quarter when the teams swarmed backwards and forwards for 12 minutes without either team troubling the umpires.

Even the players grew weary. Kerry had four attacks and Donegal three and still it remained 1-4 to 0-7, for what Kieran Donaghy said felt like three hours. For most people, denied the growing jubilation of Kerry supporters and the rising anxieties of Donegal’s, it was hard going no matter how allegedly fascinating the tactical nuances.

And if it’s all about winning, what’s the justification for losing?