Joe Canning: Freetakers are taken for granted up until they start missing

People take freetakers for granted. Among pundits, among the general public, it’s like they aren’t really noticed until they start missing – and then nobody notices anything else. A high return from your freetaker isn’t hoped for, it’s expected. When it doesn’t happen, it stands out a mile.

Last weekend, Cork and Clare both had freetakers who had off days. Clare only scored five points from 14 frees/65s, Cork scored seven from 12. Clare got away with it, Cork didn’t. I watched both matches, knowing what the guys out on the pitch were going through. The pressure involved is intense.

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When it goes right for freetakers, I’m not sure they get the credit they deserve. How often do you hear someone going, “He scored 10 frees but he got nothing from play”? The implication is that if you didn’t score from play, how have you contributed? Okay, you scored your frees but that’s your job. As if those 10 frees were handy scores.

Now, some of them probably were – I would guess that if you took any of the teams in the championship, you could give the frees to anyone from 1 to 15 and they’d probably score half of them. Some of them would maybe get up to around seven out of 10.

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There was a time when scoring seven frees out of 10 was seen as a good enough day’s work for a specialist freetaker. But any team that has a seven-out-of-10 return over the coming weeks will be in real danger of coming out on the wrong side of a tight result. The standard is just too high. Can Clare survive a repeat performance the next day with TJ Reid on the frees for Kilkenny? I doubt it.

So when I hear someone dismissing a freetaker’s 10 frees, my mind goes to the three that would have been missed by the other players on his team. Those are the pressure ones, the ones that are on a tight angle or into a tricky wind but that absolutely need to be nailed. Those three frees are the difference between losing and winning and they’re the ones the freetaker is there to convert.

It sticks in your head. I had a free to level the All-Ireland final in injury-time in 2012. I had missed one just before it and I knew this was the last puck of the game. Right at that moment, as I got ready to take it, the thought that was in my head was that if I didn’t score it, those two missed frees were all anyone was going to point to as being the difference between us and Kilkenny.

Personally, I liked that pressure. I think most freetakers probably do. They want to be the one who has to take on the shot to save the game or to win it. That’s who they were in their back garden when they were eight years old, lining up a free to win the All-Ireland final. I enjoyed the pressure of taking them when it really counted. It appealed to the competitor in me.

The hardest frees come at the start of the game and at the end. The ones in the middle are usually all part of the flow of the game – you’re settled, you have your eye in, you’re keeping the scoreboard ticking along. But you need that first one to settle you and get you into the game. That ramps up the pressure on it.

All you want is a nice handy one in front of the posts to start off. It isn’t even so much for you, it’s nearly for the crowd more so. Because you always hear them groaning if you miss the first one. You can sense their frustration and it can have a huge bearing on you. So you always want to put that to bed as quickly as you can.

I think a bit of that applied to Tony Kelly on Saturday. He missed a handy enough one and then soon after he missed a 65. You could hear the crowd getting a bit anxious. Then he went back into his own half to take a long one. I was in the RTÉ box at the time and I was beside Davy Fitzgerald. “He shouldn’t go back for this,” I said to Fitzy.

It was a low-percentage shot, far from the ideal chance to get himself back into the game. He missed it and then he missed one from play a bit later. He got himself up and running as the game wore on but Peter Duggan had to take over the frees. That’s two games in a row where Clare have had to change freetaker midway through. It’s an obvious area they will have to tighten up on.

I always found that you can’t really separate freetaking from your general game play. It’s part and parcel of your game. If you score that settling free early on, it can give you the confidence to play well in open play. If you miss a few in a row, it can be tricky to find your general form.

In 2014, the Galway management decided to take me off the frees and to put Conor Cooney on them. They had no issue with my strike rate or anything – I think it was as much to get Conor into the game a bit more. I didn’t mind. All that mattered to me was that they were scored. This was for the betterment of the team so it didn’t bother me one way or the other.

Your routine is everything when it comes to taking frees. The aim is always to keep is as basic as possible and to do the same thing each time. A big part of it is getting your heart-rate down so that you take emotion out of it. This is harder than it sounds – you’re in the thick of a championship match after all. You’ve been running around all over the place, putting in hits, taking hits. And all the time you want to take to slow down your heart-rate, the opposition supporters are telling you to get on with it and stop wasting time.

[ Joe Canning: I loved having a chip on the shoulder, I wanted it ]

But your routine has to be your routine. You train for that moment to keep your routine the same no matter what, be it in the first minute or the last minute, be it out on the wing or in front of the posts. My routine was to stand over the ball, shrug my shoulders back and take three deep breaths to get myself relaxed. After that, it’s a matter of trusting your practice and believing in the work you have done.

There’s not a lot of variation between the different grounds around the country when it comes to freetaking. There’s a few places alright where the posts are shorter than others – Walsh Park in Waterford springs to mind. It can be tricky taking frees there because although the target is the same size as everywhere else, the picture in your mind is that bit smaller as you stand over the free.

Croke Park can be a difficult place too when you start taking frees there for the first time. I guess it must be because of the design of the stadium but it’s a place with a really strange wind. It swirls around and goes in different directions throughout the game so it can be very hard for you to trust it.

I’ve been there on days when the flags on the Hogan Stand side have been pointing one way and the ones on the Cusack Stand side are going the other. Or when the flags on the wall up behind Hill 16 are being whipped by the wind and the ones down on the pitch are just hanging down limp. Even on a calm day, you can never fully trust that a gust isn’t going to come in from some weird angle at the wrong time.

The only way to get good at taking frees in Croke Park is to take frees at Croke Park. Everybody struggles at the start but the longer you go in your career, the more you get used to it. Eventually, you come to learn what works and you get back to focusing on your routine.

I loved taking frees. I enjoyed the challenge and I wanted the pressure. I knew that if they went wrong on me, I would get stick for it. I was okay with that. These games matter to people. If it’s your job to score the frees, you should feel like you’ve let people down if you don’t get them.

If I could have one free back from my career, it would be the one at the end of the 2018 All-Ireland final against Limerick. I should have scored it. I know I should have. It was within my range but I tried to hit it too hard and I didn’t connect as well as I should have. I let people down on that one. No two ways about it.

And I accept that people have a right to be annoyed about it. That’s what I was out there to do and I didn’t do it. Put it this way – I would rather they were annoyed to what I get instead. I live in Limerick and there isn’t a week goes by where somebody doesn’t thank me for missing that free and dropping it short. Trust me, I’d much prefer someone would give out to me than have to live with the thanks of the Limerick public!

But that’s what happens to you when you’re a freetaker. Eventually, in a crucial game, it’s going to come down to you. Miss and you’ll hear about it for years. Score and you’re just doing your job. No point giving out about it. That’s just the way it is.