Women show the way to play ball

Back in our younger days, when the grey hairs were a little less prominent and the faces a lot less lined, the week after the All-Ireland football final used to be accompanied by the same strange rituals. As the senior GAA journalists skipped off to the sunshine for their annual winter hibernation, all the junior hacks who had been left behind used to cower in fear under our desks in the sports department.

Anything that might spare you from being assigned to cover the women's football final the following Sunday was worthy of the strongest consideration. Dread and trepidation had infiltrated our very being.

How stupid and foolish we were. Last Sunday's thrilling and engrossing final between Mayo and Laois was just further proof of the distance the women's game has travelled in a relatively short time. It had continuous movement, fast and accurate transfer of the ball and accomplished score-taking. Everything, in fact, that seems to have seeped remorselessly out of the men's code over the last decade or so. Throw in the total absence of malice, gamesmanship or bad temper and you have a mix that becomes increasingly attractive with every passing year.

Detractors point to the absence of genuine contact and more restrained way the game is played. They may well have a point but go to your local club's next league or championship match and you will see the stultifying effect that over-emphasis on the physical aspect of Gaelic football is having at every level of the game.

Straddling all of this is also a palpable sense of sheer enjoyment in the way these women play the game. This in turn produces entertainment of the highest order. Take one example from the male championship this summer and compare and contrast. A particularly unwelcome tactic was the tendency of many of the more defence-minded teams - barring Galway in the All-Ireland final and perhaps Westmeath - to withdraw both of their half-forwards to covering positions. If you were lucky this would mean positioning themselves much closer to their midfielders.

But on occasions it also meant a player selected, in theory at least, to supply possession to his inside forwards and maybe pick off a score or two himself, was positioned in front of his full back or one of his corner backs to close down his opponents' scoring opportunities. The beautiful game it most certainly wasn't.

A variation on this theme, and one which was particularly to the fore here in Ulster, was the use of a half-forward to stop the run of opposing half-backs or midfielders. This turned out to be even less sophisticated than it sounds and consisted solely of the same half-forward unceremoniously rugby tackling the man to the ground as often as he could get away with it before a yellow card was produced. And if the resulting frees were conceded outside kicking range, then all the better.

NOW, at no point during the entire hour at Croke Park last Sunday was there any indication that Mayo and Laois were not committed to the cause of winning an All-Ireland title. Indeed, some of the clashes as two women careered into each other in search of possession were uncompromising in the extreme.

But there was none of this cynical deployment of players to carry out duties other than those normally expected in their respective positions. Call them old-fashioned, if you like, but the great and the good of women's Gaelic football actually believe forwards are there to score not spoil. That attitude is as refreshing as it is unusual.

This process of comparison is not sterile or irrelevant because there are some positive lessons to be taken from this mind-set and approach to the game. While men's Gaelic football now tends to be joyless and dour, an altogether more celebratory atmosphere permeates the women's game. You can see it in the players and they way in which they express themselves. And you can also see it in the crowd. Over 21,000 were in Croke Park and it's a fair bet they derived more pleasure from what they saw than those who had the misfortune to endure some of the more dour games in the men's championship this summer.

Senior male inter-county teams now play as if paralysed by the fear of losing. That fear has now become totally infused into the male code. It starts with the managers who, with one or two honourable exceptions, appear to derive little real pleasure from their station in life. Maybe they are only taking their lead from their puppet masters among the delegates to and members of the county boards. The recent shameful treatment of both Val Andrews and Tom Carr is proof positive of the expendable commodities managers have now become in the eyes of these GAA apparatchiks.

All of this then feeds into the players and expresses itself first in a distrust of the attendant media and then in a lack of confidence in their own ability. There can be no other explanation as to why you hear stories on the GAA bush telegraph about this midfielder or that forward who is absolutely flying in training, popping points over from everywhere. He is the man, you are told, who is going to lead the county out of the dark days and into the light. Imagine your surprise then when he slopes out on to the championship field and feebly fails to kick the ball more than 30 yards at any stage of the game.

From there the trickle-down is inevitable. The competitive pressure on young players is now immense and championships at juvenile, minor and under-21 level are now contested with all the intensity of their senior counterparts. This on its own is not necessarily a bad thing but it is hard not to conclude that something precious is being lost in the headlong rush towards success and trophies. On the basis that any county can only field 15 inter-county footballers at any one time, it is obvious the needs of many hundreds more are being at best under-valued and at worst ignored.

A recurring theme in GAA circles has been the need for those in control of the game to broaden their horizons and be prepared to import ideas from other games and codes. This has been resisted in some quarters but has been adopted by the GAA to good effect in areas like on-field discipline and off-the-pitch suspensions. The tendency in these situations is to look to Britain, Australia or America for inspiration. But on the evidence of the healthy state of women's football, the answers might lie a lot closer to home.