Possibilities endless in search of perfect game

As a new football season begins KEITH DUGGANgets the opinion of some leading coaches on where the game is at right now and where it is going

‘I THINK football has changed a bit this year,” mused Colm O’Rourke at one point last summer on The Sunday Game. It was the least noisy observation made by the holy trinity of Gaelic football panellists Spillane, O’Rourke and Brolly during their Salem Witch Trials act last summer and it was also the most important.

O’Rourke said it as an afterthought and it was an indirect reference not just to the startling impact that Donegal’s forensic defensive system had had on the championship but on a series of tactically riveting games and a football season whose very last word went to a scoring goalkeeper. And O’Rourke’s sentiment carried unlikely echoes of Hollywood in that it mirrored the central theme of the baseball film Moneyball.

As a film, it achieves the impossible: it makes the audience root for statistics, and as a story about sports it contains a message relevant to Gaelic football. “If we win with this team, we will have changed the game,” says Brad Pitt’s character Billy Beane, who in 2002 took the Oakland Athletics through an unprecedented 20-game winning streak, a feat that no other American League side had ever managed.

The genius was that Beane achieved this by cobbling together a team of obscure bit players and one broken down superstar who, while individually lacking the spectacular specialist gifts of baseball’s feted stars, collectively achieved superior statistical averages and an ability to get on base and squeeze out wins.

Scouting knowledge was discarded in favour of sabermetrics – players judged through the prism of statistical data – and the ability of the comparatively impoverished Oakland A’s to not just compete, but beat the richest teams in the league with a system that shook the belief system of America’s baseball to its core.

Beane, the architect in chief, was regarded as attempting to destroy the “national pastime” with his soulless meddling. But at season’s end, he was offered (and turned down) one of the biggest contracts in the history of American sport to go and manage the Boston Red Sox. And in the years afterwards, it was acknowledged that his emphasis on statistical evidence rather than the good old hunches of tobacco-spitting scouts had been broadly adopted by all the major teams.

Something similar happened during the All-Ireland football championship last summer. The belief evinced by Pat Spillane after the Donegal-Dublin All-Ireland semi-final – that the defeat of the Donegal team had somehow saved the game from a diabolical fate – missed the point. The game was saved from nothing because that semi-final – and the quarter-final between Donegal and Kildare – had already revealed something of Gaelic football’s hidden dimensions. The hope that what Jim McGuinness and Donegal did with their season was a once-in-a-lifetime break from tradition would seem innocent at best.

For everyone decrying the defensive system as being against the spirit of the game, there was almost certainly a young football coach with big ideas, taking notes just to see if he could learn anything and use it for his team. You can be sure that there are already a few coaches out there dreaming of the perfect Gaelic football game: keeping an opposition team scoreless.

“There is no question that tactics can permeate down to club level,” says Pat O’Shea. The former All-Ireland winning manager with Kerry is now coaching with the Munster council. “When something is seen on a national level to be successful, more often than not club managers and teams do adapt it. The reality is that people are thinking more seriously and deeply about the game than ever before. They are looking at ways of trying to nullify the opposition. And that can mean a more negative approach rather than simply trying to outscore the other team.”

Like many sports people, O’Shea has a broad interest in sport. As well as making his name as a highly skilful forward with Dr Crokes and Kerry, O’Shea was an excellent basketball player and he began to follow baseball during summers spent in the USA. Although the dynamic virtues of the home run will always embody the popular appeal of baseball, there is equal appreciation for a no-hitter – a pitcher who manages to prevent the opposition team from hitting the ball.

By definition, watching a pitcher frustrate the attacking talents ought to be boring for the audience. But it has become part of the culture. Not only that, but preventing a team from getting any players on base is given the divine accolade of the “perfect game”. The variety of ways in which a team can excel at baseball fascinated O’Shea.

“We tend to look at things in a simplistic and traditional way here, which suggests that it should be all about winning through high scoring and all that,” O’Shea points out.

“If you look at the trend of players of the year awards for the last few decades, it is nearly always the attacking players who get the plaudits. You do have to question whether defence is as valued in Gaelic football as it could be. It is a positive that people are thinking about the game and appreciating the nuances of the game and that there are going to be different ways of approaching it now.”

Maybe the perfect game for Donegal last summer would have been something akin to the baseball ideal: a team held scoreless, with no frees conceded within kicking distance. But it would be surprising if the Ulster champions merely go out and repeat their formula of last season; McGuinness has frequently made the observation that “if you are standing still, you are going backwards”. The interesting aspect of this season is the legacy left by the Donegal framework: to see what other teams and managers have learned from last season.

The first game of the new season took place in Ballyhaunis on Wednesday night. “Probably the worst conditions I ever saw a game played in,” laughed John Maughan, who is coaching GMIT this year.

He was pleasantly surprised that the players managed to score at all, given the elements. But even in the maelstrom, there was sharp attacking football on view. Maughan coached Mayo teams to three All-Ireland finals and all three teams played open, attacking football; Mayo seem incapable of fielding cynical teams.

Maughan is no fan of the idea of tactically cagey football, but nor does he fear it becoming the dominant mode in the game.

“It’s not part of the DNA and make-up of many counties and I don’t see that changing. For Mayo or Galway or Kerry, it would take a generation or more to change the orthodox system that teams use. We had guys like Jason Doherty playing last night and they want to be deployed at full forward and they want to be on the ball. We will always have an extra corner forward falling back to cover. Dublin dropped their half forwards back for a number of years. Kerry do the same. But Donegal took it to a new level. I would see it as a threat to the game if everyone adopted the Donegal trend but I don’t think it will be widely used.”

The flip-side is that the pressure on managers and teams to achieve results has become constant. Donegal hardly invented the defensive system, objections to Tyrone’s ravenous tackling and work rate are almost a decade old.

When Dublin scraped through that notorious semi-final against Donegal, Pat Gilroy had one thing to say about the opposition’s approach: “I totally admire them”. There were probably three reasons for this: 1) as a pragmatic football coach, he meant it. 2) The sheer intensity of that game brought his team along enormously. 3) The critical flak that Donegal took meant that there was almost no scrutiny of the fact that Dublin also employ a heavily defensive system – albeit linked to a lightning and wonderfully exciting counter-attacking ability. And it works.

“It is a results business,” Maughan says. “The pressure is immense. It starts at FBD League or McKenna Cup in January. I’d have no interest in going back in because it has become extreme. So I do sympathise with the need to get victories almost immediately. But players have a big say now and they are smart and informed. And I don’t think they would have the interest to run with it. They want to play ball and have a bit of fun, particularly at club level.”

Still, the demands placed on players now means that they no longer want to merely be part of the pageant. Each season has seen a new trend. Cork assembled a team of tall and strong athletes in 2009. A year later, they won the All-Ireland against a Down team that came hurtling out of the Mournes exhibiting typical Down flamboyance.

In January of 2011, Dublin began their dawn training sessions. By September, they were champions. There has been no identifiable pattern for success over the past decade. The biggest shock of the last 10 years – and one of the biggest in the history of Gaelic football – was the 2004 All-Ireland quarter-final victory by Fermanagh over Armagh.

Charlie Mulgrew’s skinny kids took on the toughest, most-impenetrable team in Ireland and beat them with schoolyard tactics – they just kept running and dodging the hits. “Youth is a great thing. Two points up at half-time and I just said ‘have a go’,” said Mulgrew.

It is too easily forgotten that Fermanagh came within a whisker of reaching an All-Ireland final that year, losing after a replay to Maughan’s Mayo. The Mayo man would have recognised the parallels in what Mulgrew achieved. In 1992, he had taken a Clare team from nowhere to the brink of All-Ireland glory. Cork and Meath had been the dominant teams of the era, both were hard, aggressive, driven, talented teams. Clare were a breath of fresh air and the tactic Maughan used was an army man who could run all day.

“We had Noel Roche and we just wound him up. He had this fabulous engine and we played him corner forward but he just carried the ball from one end of the field to the other. You deploy the resources that you have. If you don’t have a ball winner inside, you can’t play a long ball inside. So your game plan is dictated by resources.”

That will always be true – and it is why the most gifted teams will win more often than not. But the potential for coaches to influence the ebb and flow of games was illuminated by last season. Only the blind won’t see that the army of young coaches out there – Jason Ryan, James Horan, Gilroy, Maurice Horan, James McCartan, Kieran McGeeney, McGuinness, Kevin Walsh – will adapt and tinker with systems that improve the statistical imperatives of the game and give them a better chance of winning.

Pat O’Shea will always be a proponent of attacking football. But he points to the history of soccer, in which Brazil are the traditional curators of the beautiful game, while Italy are seen to represent masterful methodology as proof that there is room for several systems to flourish. In basketball, even two-bit teams generally know off two or three defensive alignments and several attacking plays.

“In that game, they break it down to the level where they know how to defend if they lose the tip-off and how to run a play for a quick score if they win it. Everything is broken down and analysed,” O’Shea says. “If the game is to develop, we have to do that. It is a natural progression that teams should be equipped with ways to win, whether they be attacking formations or defensive mechanisms.”

Rather than representing the endgame of Gaelic football, last summer’s mind games may well have been a glimpse into the future.

“In their minds, it’s threatening the game,” someone tells Billy Beane towards the end of Moneyball. “It’s threatening the way they do things.” Gaelic football may well have reached a similar place where new systems and new thinking now threaten the old ways. But the game is there to be interpreted. There is nothing to fear but fear itself.