I was in Armagh on Saturday evening and saw the deluge of hand-passed points the home side scored – seven of their 20-point total. Galway got three goals and beat them by a point. The lesson appeared stark. The team that went for goals got their reward. Armagh’s cowardice got what it deserved.
The truth is not that simple. Watching the game back, six of the seven Armagh points scored with the hand were players making the right decision in that moment.
The only outlier was the last one, in the 61st minute, when Jason Duffy took his point to put them three up. Having won a turnover on the 20-metre line, Duffy had Cian McConville waiting to his right at the far post for an easy finish. Duffy also had Oisín O’Neill to his left as an ideal decoy, which would have held the covering Galway defender. He elected to handpass it over. That was a cop-out.
Context is everything. Duffy was just on as a sub and was no doubt anxious to make an impression. The point put them three up. Armagh may have felt they were playing well enough at that stage to hold onto a three-point lead. That proved wide of the mark.
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Two minutes after that, Oisín McDonagh played in Cillian McDaid with a brilliant handpass. McDaid took it in closer than any of the Armagh fisted points we’d seen all evening and went for goal off his right foot, from the right-hand post, outside the large parallelogram. The shot went across Blaine Hughes’s body, who pushed it clear. It was a tough goal-chance, but he went for it and Galway worked a score from the resultant 45 regardless.
Three minutes later, Rob Finnerty played a similar pass to McDonagh’s into Matthew Tierney, who took it in stride. Vitally, he cut across the covering defender, Gareth Murphy, leaving him with no play he could make on the ball. Tierney took it inside the area and with his left foot, shot expertly past Hughes for the goal that put Galway a point up.
Oisín Conaty got possession in the next play, took the Galway defence for a run and then shot for goal with his right foot from a tight angle on the right outside the large square. He was beating the covering Galway defender Jack Glynn for pace, but he hadn’t gotten goalside of him. Would a fisted point there have been the right decision?
There’s an argument. What is not up for debate is that Conaty’s goal chance was far harder than Tierney’s. What’s also not up for debate is that Galway’s need for a goal was greater. An eighth fisted point would have gotten Armagh back level. Of course, a shot on target might have forced a save and a chance at a point from the 45.
We can ignore Galway’s second goal for the purposes of intent, as the only thing Finnerty meant to do with that was put it over the bar for a two-pointer. Their first goal, from Kieran Molloy, was from a better position than any of Armagh’s fisted points other than Duffy’s, but goalkeeper Hughes will feel he should have done better. Was it the correct decision? Well . . . it depends, doesn’t it. Molloy bought a ticket and his number came up.
I watched the game back through the prism of the discussion it sparked over hand-passed points, and whether the Football Review Committee should have banned them. Time and again, Armagh ended up with right-footed players advancing through a channel about 10 metres to the left of the Galway posts as they attacked the 20m line. Eight of their 10 first-half points came from that position.
Jarly Óg Burns fisted his two second-half points from the same channel. They’re a running team. These are the positions their hard-running style gets them into – not clean through, but with a step on a chasing defender. In those scenarios, it was either shoot (for a goal, or a point) with Jarly Óg’s weaker left foot, or fist a point.
Between Burns’s third point and Duffy’s late fluffed goal chance, Tiernan Kelly also fisted a point having actually beaten Liam Silke on the inside but from along the end-line. His only other option was to run straight at Conor Gleeson and try to engineer a penalty (or get past Gleeson and bundle the ball in with his left foot). On balance, he made the right choice.
Derry’s Conor Glass showed us spectacularly once again last weekend against Tyrone that a player motoring straight down the middle of your defence spells danger. Andrew Murnin got a brilliant goal for Armagh from a very Glass-like run and shot the week before against Monaghan, lest we forget.
But as a defender, if you’re on an angle shepherding an attacker down a channel and you reckon he’ll have to shoot across his body with his weak foot and past you to score, you’ll fancy your chances. And more importantly, the man in possession probably doesn’t fancy his.
A ban, whether in the rule-book or one more informally enforced in a dressingroom, doesn’t allow for the multitude of variables a game throws up. Galway took a spin on the roulette wheel and came out on top on Saturday. Armagh’s approach last weekend might well pay dividends for them, sooner rather than later.
