Is the clock ticking on possession football?

RTÉ Sport Reporter

Gaelic football is in crisis again. No news here. Crisis is Gaelic football's natural state.

It is easier to list out the eras in which the game was not held to be in crisis. Perhaps for a brief time in the late 90s? After the sport emerged from its Charlton-era funk but before puke football. Maybe during the Cork-Kerry heyday at the turn of the 2010s, before Jim McGuinness arrived with his 'system' and well before Jim Gavin's Dubs destroyed the morale of rural Ireland.

The latest crisis concerns the modern player's willingness to pass the ball sideways and backwards to his unmarked teammates for much longer than the normal human concentration span will currently tolerate.

Roscommon pushed the envelope farther than it had ever been pushed last Sunday and have sparked yet another state-of-the-game debate in the process. You know a tactic has really landed when rule changes are being proposed afterwards. ("Fantastic lads! That worked to a tee. The county secretary is after telling me out there he's been summoned to an emergency sitting of Congress").

The current anxiety is roughly the opposite of the puke football crisis of 20 years ago. Back then, frenzied swarm tackling reduced the game to an anarchic mess, in which skillful players barely had time to breathe let alone play football. Seamus Moynihan famously remarked that the middle third of the pitch during the 2003 All-Ireland semi-final was like Times Square.

Nowadays, by contrast, average blue-collar defenders have all the time in the world to potter around with the ball, provided they're not inclined to be too ambitious with it.

Aaron Kernan argued on 'Smaller Fish' this week that all that's required to function as an inter-county footballer now is an ability to run and fist-pass.

He warmed to the theme on 'The Championship' on RTÉ Radio 1 on Friday night: "It's very easy to do. It's very easy to be able to run and very easy to be able to handpass the ball. Anybody can do it. To see our county teams doing it when they have the ability and the skillset to do much more..."

Others took a radically different view and felt we were witnessing the very cutting edge of modern football.

Philly McMahon lauded the marathon passing session, adding that he couldn't understand how people could swoon over Tiki-Taka possession play in soccer but scorn the Gaelic football equivalent.

He did concede that the "dynamics are different".

The dynamics in question relate to the rule in soccer, which is now very deep into its current trial run, barring everyone but the goalkeeper from picking up the ball.

As Kevin Moran said in Codebreaker, the recent documentary on his career, "Gaelic football was very comfortable to me. As long as I had a ball in my hand, no one was going to get it from me".

In the infamous six-minute period, there were 77 passes in total: 46 of them via the hand, none of the kick-passes were high-risk and goalkeeper Conor Carroll handled possession 19 times.

By the 18th or 19th time the Roscommon goalie got his glove on the ball, any stranger to the sport in Croke Park must have concluded that this was indeed a peculiar ritual they were looking at. The Hill 16 crowd grew incensed and were by now giving the performance a furious thumbs down.

Crucially, however, all's well that ended well from a Roscommon point of view. They wound up working a score out of the move, after injecting a rare bit of pace into proceedings. They extended their lead from three to four points, we were now much closer to half-time. That the watching public had long since sank into a stupor was neither here nor there, from their perspective.

That some Rossies are a bit miffed by the focus on it is understandable. "The Dubs do this for the guts of a decade and it's elite level genius. We do it for five minutes - give or take - and the sky falls in", is the gist of their argument.

It isn't really about the Rossies. Their boundary-pushing bout of keep ball was merely the most extreme, the most viral example of an approach which has taken over the game.

Nearly all the top teams now nurse possession as a matter of course. It is customary for teams who win back possession to compulsively throw three to four sideways passes just while they're getting their bearings. A throat clear before they work out how to progress the ball forward.

The standard mode of dispossession in Gaelic football is a cluster of defenders bottling up the 'ball-carrier' and crowding him out until he is done for over-carrying. The modern player is ultra quick to scent when he might be being led down a blind alley into a nest of hostile combatants and realising when he needs to wheel back, often to the sanctuary of his own final third.

Of course, the conundrum for the defending team is once they tire of this game and begin to press up aggressively, they get pulled out of shape and the team in possession are able to get in behind them. The latter might even deign to try for a score at that point, were they feeling especially cavalier.

Without rule changes, where could we get to? Teams will surely become even more practiced and sophisticated at running down the clock. Six minutes of stroking the ball around in your own half may become unworthy of note. In the future, if a team noses ahead with 15 minutes left, could that be that?

The whole practice has been going on a while.

Tomás Ó Sé kicked the final score of the 2009 All-Ireland final on 58 minutes to put Kerry 0-16 to 1-09 in front. Most - albeit not all - of the remaining 12 or so minutes plus injury-time consisted of Kerry carefully playing keep ball, as Cork lads huffed around helplessly after them, while confronting the sickening reality that their neighbours had turned them over on the biggest day again.

The Dubs became masters of it under late stage Gavin, having dispensed with the champagne football of the 2013-14 period.

They were hit hard by the Donegal sucker punch in 2014 and pragmatism reigned thereafter. Diarmuid Connolly was seemingly never entirely forgiven for trying a Hollywood style point from a sideline in the dying seconds of the drawn 2016 final rather than poking a short ball to Ciarán Kilkenny, as best practice dictated.

Shane Walsh, with his incorrigible penchant for swerved cross-field balls late in games, is another maverick who doesn't appear to have received the most up-to-date memos on the optimal way to play the game now.

Up to now, the legislators have tinkered around with piecemeal changes but the radicals may have forced a turnover.

It was a relatively inauspicious NBA game between the Fort Wayne Pistons - before they decamped to Detroit - and the reigning champions, the Minneapolis Lakers, who would in time depart for La La Land, in November 1950 that would change basketball forever.

The humble Pistons were terrified of the Lakers' giant 6ft 10 MVP George Mikan and hit upon a reviled strategy of passing the ball aimlessly around the court to prevent the opposition getting hold of it.

The crowd howled their disapproval, the Lakers' players and even the referees begged the Pistons to attempt a score. The Lakers resorted to fouling eventually - your average GAA team would probably be quicker to reach for that solution - and the game degenerated into a series of free-throws. The Pistons wound up winning the landmark game 19-18, still the lowest score in the history of the NBA.

Within a few years, the shot clock was born.

Working out the contours of a shot clock in Gaelic football could be tricky. How long should it be? Won't it encourage even more packed defences? Isn't it yet another thing to be loading on top of referees, who have enough on their plates counting steps and deciphering what is a tackle?

Paul Flynn pointed out this week that any team retreating to the blanket to run out the clock will have to find a way to get up the pitch again. The ambling, ponderous football we're used to watching could be discarded and the game may become more stretched.

The shot clock could soon be coming to a freshers tournament near you.

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