In the survey concluded last week by the Hurling Advisory Group, there was a question about the biggest problem faced by the game, replete with a menu of suggested replies. Three of them referred to rules enforcement, two referred to playing numbers and overall competitiveness and one referred to the nature of the game now and how it is played.
The final option nodded to the large constituency of hurling protectionists: “I don’t think there is a major problem,” the answer read.
When the formation of the advisory group was announced by the GAA president Jarlath Burns, he was at pains to stress hurling didn’t need a suite of rule changes or attitude adjustments in the way that football had done. Burns, who doesn’t always read the room, was acutely sensitive to hurling’s sense of itself as a thing of art and beauty. It was wise to assume that no other opinions were welcome.
If Gaelic football was ultimately convinced of the need for plastic surgery, hurling was unlikely to even entertain Botox.
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At the root of all this is the perception that hurling has an institutional resistance to change. That it sees change as something wild and invasive, like Japanese knotweed. The unquoted reality, however, is that hurling has changed profoundly in front of our eyes, not by committee or by force of sandbox experiments, but organically.
All the agents of change have come from within the game. Not by a process of consultation or with anyone’s express permission, but my means of new thinking. Far from resisting change, hurling has been swamped by it. Has the game been enhanced or disfigured? That is a matter of taste.
The two elements that have changed the game more than any others are the increase in passing and the decrease in contests for the ball. It is not quite a zero- sum transaction but these elements are inextricably linked.
If we were to take a small sample from the bloodstream of the game, how about the first 10 minutes from the All-Ireland finals of 1996, 2006 and last year.
In the 1996 final between Wexford and Limerick there were just three passes in the opening 10 minutes and 28 contests for the ball; 10 years later, when Cork played Kilkenny, there were six passes in the opening 10 minutes and 21 contests for the ball. There is enough deviation in those numbers to suggest an evolutionary shift had started.
By last year, and long before then, everything had changed fundamentally. In the opening 10 minutes of the game between Tipperary and Cork there were 26 passes and just 13 contests for the ball.
The game is not entirely divorced from randomness but, over time, there has been a conscious decoupling. By 1996, ground hurling was under siege and first-time pulling overhead was only liable to happen under puck outs or occasionally when a ball dropped in the square.
And yet, in the first 10 minutes of the 1996 final there were 19 attempted pulls on the ball. Ten years later, there were just four. In the opening 10 minutes of last year’s final there was one ground stroke, executed as an uncontested flick.
Ground hurling or first-time hurling in all its manifestations had been overcome by the same forces that have suppressed contests for the ball. Everybody wanted more control.
Over the last two years Gaelic football has been re-energised by visionary rule changes that were partly designed to decrease control and increase chaos. There are still periods of tedious keep-ball, or as the coaches would have it, “resting on the ball”. But the scoreboard is a volatile instrument in every game now. Long-range shooting, which had been coached out of football, has a virility it never enjoyed before.
The new rules incentivised attacking play and deregulated risk. In hurling, though, there is no market for those changes. There is no way of “resting on the ball”. There have never been more shots in the game and there have never been more scores. Too many? That’s a different conversation.
Long-range shooting is easier now than ever before, and, in that sense, it has never been less spectacular. When Richie Bennis scored what is now a 65 to win the 1973 Munster final for Limerick with the final puck of the game, it was the only 65 scored in that year’s championship.
In the advisory group’s survey one of the questions asked was whether 65s should be moved to the halfway line. What material difference would that make? In a club game in Cork last weekend, a wind-assisted puck-out landed under the opposition crossbar and had to be batted away by the other goalie.
Just like in golf, the distance of the average drive in hurling has never been longer, and yet there has never been more emphasis on playing the ball short. That fundamental philosophical shift had nothing to do with a rule change or a think tank: it was a powerful and organic change of mind.
In the question on the survey about “hurling’s single biggest problem”, one of the suggested answers was that hurling had become “too tactical and possession-based”. That is where taste comes in. Not everybody likes passing. If you watch the 1996 final now from start to finish, or even the 2006 final, the hurling is exhilarating for entirely different reasons to the best games of the modern era. It is not the same game.
But there is no way of going back. If you go to an under-14 match now, all of the kids are playing stick passes. Those kids, as spectators, have never experienced hurling as a game where the ball was exchanged up and down the field with unthinking abandon.
The ball became bouncier and easier to manipulate. Hurleys became shorter as an evolutionary reaction to stick passing and the imperative to get the ball off the ground and into the hand swiftly and smoothly. With possession, strategy became more sophisticated and enforceable. The game changed by a chain of evolutionary events.
All of that is infinitely more powerful than tweakments to the rules.
More than 8,000 people responded to the survey, and it will be fascinating to track the work of this advisory group over the coming months. How good is the game now? Probably about as imperfect as it always was. It is just that the imperfections are not the same as before.
Where does it go next? Not backwards.
