GAA can no longer brush away basic errors

SIDELINE CUT:How can managers be expected to ask their players to believe in a game where something as important and basic as scoring a goal can be left as a grey area, as a matter of luck, asks KEITH DUGGAN

“THIS IS a sharp time, now, a precise time; we live no longer in the dusky afternoon when evil mixes itself with good and befuddles the world,” declares Judge Danforth in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. Easy for him to say. He only ever had to decide upon what did or did not constitute witchcraft. Did he ever have to adjudicate over the nightmare of the Square Ball? Did he ever have to serve as umpire in the white heat of a championship match?

A week after the Donegal-Kildare game and the thunderclap of that match still rumbles around in the mind. It has been a long time since a football match captured the imagination like last Saturday night’s All-Ireland quarter-final. The thousands watching on television could hear it in the thrilled shock in Kevin McStay’s voice as he registered that Kevin Cassidy’s final shot was going to float far enough to make it one of those immortal scores.

By all accounts, it made for pretty gripping viewing across Ireland. But for those in Croke Park, the game was an elixir. People from both counties left the place stoned on the pure exhilaration and drama. The 6pm throw-in seemed daft and ill-considered when it was announced but the timing enhanced the occasion. There was nothing of the sleepy afternoon about this where you have that sense of attending a match in a city in which shopping and boozing are the chief preoccupations. This was tea-time: shutters were down on the fashion churches and lights were beginning to blaze across the city.

It was cold for the last evening in July and as the game started with the edge and sternness that most had predicted, Croke Park was already shadowy and that seemed right. By half-time, purists studied in dismay the spartan scoreline of 0-5 to 0-3. The national prosecution was led by Pat Spillane, a man who does vexation like nobody else in Ireland.

Pat has been a television personality for so long now RTÉ ought to remind the public more often that he was, back when the Bee Gees were still young, a gem of a footballer. A mop-top bundle of finesse and manic energy on arguably the greatest Gaelic football team. Sometimes, because Pat was one of the best players on the best of teams, the impatience he evinces can be hard to take. At half-time on Saturday night, it seemed like it was time to retire him to the velvet box along with Statler and Waldorf from The Muppets. Any attempt at critical analysis was ditched in favour of a general crib about the standard of play and the defensive stratagems of both teams. But most unforgivably, there was no context, no recognition of the fact that for both counties, trying to get to an All-Ireland semi-final represented a hugely important moment.

An hour later, Pat had, despite himself, become caught up in the unrelenting intensity and unpredictability of the match. He no longer cared about the rate at which scores were occurring. A much more interesting dimension had developed. It was impossible to guess when or how – or even if – the next score might occur. The teams were so successful at shutting one another down that every concocted score felt like a prison break-out.

At half-time, someone sent the most prescient message of the evening by text: “Christy Toye to rise from the dead?” On cue, the languid Donegal man trotted on for his first competitive appearance in over a year and slotted the game’s only goal with his very first touch of the ball. That score might have caused Kildare to strike the tents but instead they dug deep and chased the game into the marvellous spectacle that extra-time became.

Afterwards, Kildare coach Kieran McGeeney was asked about the cancellation of Tomás O’Connor’s second-half goal for a square ball. There is something cruelly businesslike about what happens in all sports stadiums after the theatre ends and Croke Park is no different. It was close on nine o’clock and the team coach was already rumbling and stadium workers were pushing huge wheelie bins of junk into their places and the security men were doing the rounds – the show was over.

McGeeney has been in this hollow place before – Kildare robbed by the arbitrary breaks of the game. He’s asked for comment and when he does so, his comments are tarted up to make it sound like he came out of the dressingroom all guns blazing towards officialdom. It all comes back to him repackaged as this – McGeeney is a whiner. So he challenged the gathered press men to give their opinion, to come out and say it was a goal and that these mistakes are no longer enough.

Later, Donegal manager Jim McGuinness said he would be in favour of technology or new rules or anything that would “tidy up” the issue of contentious scores.

And this is at the heart of the matter. For decades, the GAA has mirrored Irish society in that it plays fast and loose with the rules. A few years ago, Spillane was one of the guests of a GAA-themed Late Late Show. This was when Pat Kenny was still the host of the hallmark talk show. The studio was peppered with guests from Kerry and Tyrone, who had won the All-Ireland title for the third time that September. The humour was forced, the unease palpable. Because Pat is Kingdom aristocracy, some part of him naturally resented the irreverence that marked Tyrone’s ascent to the top of the football heap.

That evening, when asked about his favourite GAA moment, he turned to Mikey Sheehy’s 1978 goal against Dublin, when the Kerry man chipped Dublin goalkeeper Paddy Cullen from a quickly-taken free. It is a deservedly famous goal because it might have been the most spontaneous thing that happened in Ireland in the entire 1970s. Con Houlihan wrote about it in the Evening Press and immortalised the moment by comparing Cullen’s retreat to that of “a woman who smells a cake burning”.

Sheehy smiled bashfully in the audience as his old team-mate rhapsodised about the goal. On the issue of whether or not the free should have been rewarded, Pat was unequivocal. It should not have been, he said, in full Kerry rogue mode now. It was no free. Furthermore, he argued that the goal turned the match in Kerry’s favour – they trailed by two and won by 17 points – and set up Kerry for future All-Ireland titles. All of this was said jovially and the Dubs of that era in the audience laughed gracefully (if through gritted teeth).

But that time has passed. And isn’t it a shame that maybe the most famous goal in the history of Gaelic football has a wrongly awarded free at its source?

Basic errors can no longer be brushed away. Gaelic football at its best is a very entertaining game. But it has always been sloppy about the rules. It is not just the square ball – if that crazy regulation is ever sorted out – then the tackle or the number of steps or the third-man tackle needs to be addressed.

McGeeney has come along to Kildare and asked the players to train and live along perfectionist ideals. McGuinness has done something along the same lines in Donegal: he spoke afterwards of players “changing their bodies and their lives” to be part of his squad. The issue for McGeeney was simple last Saturday night. How can he be expected to ask his players to believe in a game where something as important and basic as scoring a goal can be left as a grey area, as a matter of luck?

What Spillane needs to understand is that for counties like Kildare and Donegal, the glittering Kerry team on which he played was like a colonial power. Today’s players weren’t even born then but they are aware of the legacy and of the shadow that Kerry side casts across the football landscape and they are still trying to escape it and to rebel against it.

That is what is going on here. That is why Croke Park seemed to tremble last Saturday night and that is why getting stung by the breaks of game can destroy a team. Mind you, did the breaks of the game ever go against Kerry?