After a siege that lasted over 10 minutes, Shane Murphy opted for a kickout that might have been invented in hot desperation. David Clifford drifted out to the Donegal 65, Murphy thumped the ball as far as he could into the wind and the greatest forward of all time used his imposing frame as a human backboard. The ball spilled from his body space and Mike Breen picked up the break.
The last time Kerry had secured one of their own kickouts in Sunday’s Division One final was in the 15th minute, when Dylan Casey was subjected to a couple of body shots and a head shot from Michael Murphy. After that, they were tied up like a Sunday roast.
Donegal won six Kerry kickouts in a row and turned four of them into scores. More than that, Donegal’s encampment in the Kerry half changed the mood and momentum of the game.
In a variety of ways, that kind of dominance is a circuit breaker. There were 28 minutes between Clifford’s early point from play and his next attempt at goal. His only notable contribution in that time was to break that dirty kickout in the middle of the field. Every one of Kerry’s opponents dreams of a future for Clifford in that role.
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In Gaelic football’s brave new world, exit strategies dictate not just the scoreboard but the energy of the game now. In every respect, it is psychological warfare. During the Donegal bombardment, Shane Murphy gathered the dead ball as quickly as he could each time and sprinted to the 20-metre line, hoping to exploit an opening before Donegal could get into formation.
But the Ulster champions had a pod of four of their quickest players shutting down any short kickouts around the 40-metre arc and deployed their biggest men to contest the long kickouts of last resort.
It took Murphy 19 seconds to take the first kickout in the sequence and most of that time was spent scanning his options. He screened his eyes from the sun and opened his palms in the universal code of a goalkeeper saying, ”give me something!“.
For the fifth kickout in the sequence, Murphy took 30 seconds between gathering the ball and kicking it. He had just made a brilliant save, deflecting a shot from Ryan McHugh over the bar and it didn’t seem like a deliberate attempt to waste time. He anxiously scanned the horizon for a place of manageable risk to land the ball. The outcome was no different: Donegal won the Kerry kickout cleanly and attacked for another score.
Kickout incarceration was a recurring theme over the weekend in Croke Park. In the Division Two final between Cork and Meath, the game was decided in a 14-minute spell in the middle of the second half when Meath won eight out of nine Cork kickouts. They entered that period trailing by two points and emerged from it leading by five.
By the time Cork finally lifted the siege, their retention stats on their own kickouts for the first hour of the game were just 10 from 28. With that in mind, it was staggering that they ended up losing by only two points.
This has been a problem for Cork at various times this season and they have obviously thought about solutions. On Sunday, they attempted four kickouts aimed at the thin peninsula of ground between the 40-metre arc and the sideline. Meath, though, hunted them down in that space and those spoiled kickouts cost Cork three scores.
But does anybody have a viable exit strategy when the heat comes on? There was an acceptance last year that teams were working things out on the hoof. According to figures collated by the GAA’s Games Intelligence Unit, the average retention rate for kickouts in last year’s National League was 59 per cent, rising to 61 per cent in the Sam Maguire and 62 per cent in the Tailteann Cup.
For all the elite teams, though, those numbers would have represented a significant drop on what they had been accustomed to under the old rules. At their imperious peak, for example, and with Stephen Cluxton in goal, Dublin routinely regathered more than 80 per cent of their kickouts. In arguably the greatest exhibition of kickouts ever seen, Dublin won every one of their 23 kickouts against Kerry in the 2023 All-Ireland final. That is unimaginable now.
The brightest minds in the game have had a full off-season and another National League to work this out and all of them have failed miserably. No team has a fail-safe, foolproof emergency option when they absolutely must win a kickout. All of them are either depending on the opposition not pushing up or hoping to seize on a breaking ball in the middle third. All of sudden, exit strategies have become the game’s biggest tyranny.
So, in their turn, everyone is suffering. When the All-Ireland quarter-final jackknifed in Armagh’s face last summer, it was essentially because they couldn’t win a kickout during a critical phase of the second half. Kerry scored 14 points in 14 minutes and nine of those scores came from Armagh kickouts.
A few weeks ago, though, Armagh returned to Croke Park and squeezed Dublin in precisely the same way: in 14-minute spell in the second half, Armagh racked up 1-6 from Dublin’s kickouts.
The purpose of changing the rules of engagement around kickouts was to propagate contests for the ball, especially in the middle third, and to generate a greater turnover in possession. The unintended consequence was to produce these spells of encampment where – like in a juvenile match – one team can’t get up the field.
The rules are not going to change. The game’s brightest minds need to think again.
