LOCKER ROOM:Rule changes should be significant events, considered at length and road-tested at several grades of the games, writes TOM HUMPHRIES
MY BOOKSHELF dips and groans at just the point where it houses Joe Lennon’s thesis for his post- graduate research degree in DCU, Towards A Philosophy for Legislation in Gaelic Games.
Joe’s bewk is one that not many of us have read. Over 600 pages on GAA rule-changes is less appetising but maybe marginally more readable than a Dan Brown blockbuster but we know that Joe’s tale doesn’t have a happy ending. Joe stopped recording the GAA’s tamperings with its own games some 12 years ago. The incessant fiddling continues however.
Joe began his trawl with what are generally accepted as the first codified and written rules relating to our games, the Killimor Rules.
These were compiled, apparently, by Pat Larkin who was “President and Chairman of the Galway Co Board for the years 1888 to 1893 inclusive – except for a period in 1888 when he was in prison”. The great thing about the Killimor Rules is their clear exposition of the truth that the more things change the more they stay the same. The rules were adopted by the club on Sunday, 22nd February, 1885 at a meeting where other things were resolved too.
The club called upon Mr Cusack (Michael not Donal Óg) to deny the “false and scandalous accusations made upon us in several of the Dublin dailies after the Ballinasloe challenge match for the silver cup, a truthful reply to which was refused to us by the same prejudiced press at the time”.
The meeting also pointedly decided that “no more challenge matches be either accepted or played against neighbouring parishes.”
The rules themselves are a model of succinct good sense. There are just 10 of them. The umpires were empowered to dismiss anybody who lost his temper, struck any of his opponents intentionally or who was “in their opinion under the influence of strong drink”. The goings on between the uncouth ruffians of Galway had little or nothing to do with what transpired in Trinity College of course and the TCD Laws of Hurley are necessarily more long-winded and appear to refer to a different game altogether.
Rule 15 gives the flavour: “Gentlemen must all appear in some coloured garment on match days. Members of the eleven and the fifteen must wear their uniforms.” Precisely. Gentlemen must all appear in some coloured garment! How elegantly put when compared with the defiantly churlish tone of the Killimor ruffians who decided “that to avoid mistakes our hurling colours for the future be green and gold”. No mention of gentlemen.
In Trinity there was, of course, no need to warn the gentlemen about showing up under the influence of strong drink or even sherry, just a short reminder in the form of Rule 16 that “the ball shall always be the object of play”. (Somewhere along the lines I’m afraid the seeds of Dublin’s hurling failure may have been sown. We adhered to the rules handed down to us by our betters in Trinity while the rest of the country went with the more robust game commended to them by Killimor.)
Our metropolitan gentlemen have duly been turning up for years dutifully wearing their coloured garments while the peasantry have merely been sucking strong mints to describe the smell of drink on their breaths. The point which we are getting to, by means of an enjoyable digression into Joe’s tome, is that all this time later the GAA is still fiddling incessantly with its product. Will we ever come to a point where we say that hurling and football have finished evolving and we have an end product?
What does the constant tinkering say about the games of football and hurling. The current proposals have much that seems like good sense, especially the return to the closed fist version of the handpass with its accompanying clear striking motion, but can the mark really work in Gaelic football and will the game still be Gaelic football?
Certainly in recent years the constant emphasis on the possession game has led to overcrowding in the middle third of the pitch and blocking the progress of any fielder who needs a runway to get airborne has become a cynical art form.
Would tactical requirements not alter that unhappy situation anyway? If it paid a team to block Darragh Ó Sé’s run to field a ball when he might have it fisted from his hands in the air or be smothered by bodies when he returns to earth, than surely the prospect of Darragh being rewarded with a free and uncontested kick would make stymieing him at source even more of a necessity? And if Darragh were to give his guards the slip and leap, salmon-like into the blue yonder and make a catch in space must he stop for the mark or can he avail of an advantage and feed his brother Tomás who is passing in the express lane? Surely as the influence of good midfielders becomes negated by cynicism the game evolves anyway as managers devise ways of keeping opponents honest and come up with tactics which protect possession more efficiently.
The response to the short puck-out strategy of the Cork hurlers suggests there is something repugnant to the true Gael about any failure to launch the ball as high and far as is physically possible but if the short puck-out is about keeping possession rather than submitting it to the lottery of the 50/50 contest than surely football could learn a similar lesson. If teams are constantly placing their kickouts at the disposal of a herd of midfield behemoths and not gaining possession surely teams will change their kickout strategy. The game has evolved into a possession and running game anyway. Surely the next logical step for all thinking managers would have been how to bypass the morass at midfield instead of upping the stakes there.
One suspects that, with football, the solution to a lot of the game’s long-term ills may turn out to be the creation of more space by trimming the game to 13-a-side. How hurling will fare under the new legislative promptings is another matter. Cutting out the liberal interpretations of the handpass which have crept in recently is a good idea but the new proposals for the square ball seem like a form of entrapment for cynics.
All these rule changes will be road-tested by the best players in the country in a competition (the league) which bears little resemblance to the proving grounds of a championship summer and no resemblance at all to the fare encountered by the Junior Bs on muddy fields in Clonshaugh or wherever.
The games need some hand on the tiller and football and hurling must have an underlying philosophy which the guardians of the game cleave to but rule changes should be significant events, considered at length and road-tested at several grades of the games.
The rest of the time the games will change as they always have, through tactical innovation of bright managers and the inspiration of great players. Gentlemen shall wear coloured garments and all others shall refrain from being intoxicated on the field of play. What else do we really need to know?
