Dublin won the ball from the throw-in and didn’t part with it until they had a shot at goal, 114 seconds later. Austin Stack Park was thronged with 10,000 people, some of whom had been queuing from before 5pm for a 7.30pm throw-in.
A lively two-piece kept the early comers entertained, rattling out familiar tunes, but nothing maudlin. Then the game started, and the ground descended into silence, like a doctor’s waiting room.
“I thought the new rules were supposed to get rid of this sort of thing,” said one Kerry supporter to his buddy, sitting in front of us in the press box.
Dublin stitched together 16 passes before a Kerry defender made a lunge for the ball; it escaped his grasp, though, and Dublin picked up the thread. Seventeen passes later they kicked a wide.
Dublin’s next move contained 13 passes; after that, 18 passes. Then they went short and wide from a kick-out and held the ball for just over three minutes: a staggering 49 passes.
[ Dublin steal the points from Kerry in adrenalin-fuelled finaleOpens in new window ]
Kerry’s defence was massed inside the 40-metre scoring arc, but was too passive; Evan Comerford, the Dublin goalkeeper, was deployed as a pivot behind Dublin’s attackers, without committing any of the Kerry defenders, or making a penetrative surge with the ball. On both sides, nobody was taking much of a chance.
Against a fierce wind, Dublin were doing the sensible thing in time-honoured fashion: minding the ball, killing the game. In his post-match interview, Jack O’Connor lamented Kerry’s comparative failure to do the same thing in the second half and blamed it partly for their defeat.
“We basically needed to get more out of our attacks in the sense of holding on to the ball for longer,” he said. “I thought we rushed a couple of shots in the second half when we could have rotated the ball. Every minute that you were knocking off the clock was getting you closer to home but unfortunately, we panicked a couple of times and took rash decisions.”
The new rules have made a terrific start. The opening rounds of the league have been the most exciting in memory, for die-hards and sceptics alike. There are significant gremlins that must be ironed out, but there has been a heartening acceptance that the reforms have improved the spectacle and that there is no turning back now.
Through its long and painful decline, though, the greatest issue that faced Gaelic football was the primacy of risk management. The game was being killed by its devotion to percentages and low-yield possession. Changing that thinking was going to require such a massive rewiring job that the FRC were never going to manage it in one take. Instead, they have introduced compulsory risk in microdoses.
Most kick-outs now are contested in the middle third, which had a massive impact on Saturday night’s game, for example. Given the strength of the wind Dublin won just less than 50 per cent of their kick-outs in the first half and Kerry won a little more than 50 per cent in the second. Neither team was able to make a stress-free exit without putting the ball at risk.
The other major ideological battleground is shooting. In the derelict game we have left behind, working the ball to designated shooting zones was the main purpose of the endless rounds of keep-ball. Ideally, nobody wanted to shoot from outside the D, or from the flanks. The heavy emphasis on efficiency identified risk as the enemy.
In the new game it is clear already that the two-point arc has the potential to be transformative. Under the old rules, anybody shooting from that distance was guilty of an offence against the game plan. It was an unconscionable risk. In some instances, it would have been condemned as an act of grandstanding or hare-brained panic.
In the new rules that kind of risky kicking has been incentivised. On Saturday night, two pointers shaped the game. In the opening quarter, Kerry kicked a pair of them in succession at a time in the match when Dublin had more than 75 per cent possession, according to RTÉ’s statistics.
Those scores changed the energy of the game and reduced the value of letting the ball rest in a deposit account, with little or no interest. That was also true in the last five minutes, when Dublin were trying to chase down a four-point deficit and Lorcan O’Dell landed two beauties.
The early rounds of the league have been characterised by entirely uncharacteristic scoreboard swings. Games have jackknifed in team’s faces. Kerry couldn’t hang on to a 12-point lead on Saturday night; Cork couldn’t hold on to a 10-point lead against Down in round two; Galway surrendered a nine-point lead against Derry on Saturday evening.
The general spike in scoring has been adrenalised by the 3v3 imperative, so that turnovers in the defensive half are leading to more productive counterattacks, and the solo-and-go frees, that are giving defences less time to set up. But ultimately, the championship will be decided on two pointers. How many are you prepared to attempt? How many reliable outside shooters do you have? Will Kerry leave David Clifford inside? Would that be crazy?
How it pans out will be fascinating. In hurling, scoring has gone through the roof over the last decade, enabled by the modern ball, but also by changed thinking. When Limerick took over their emphasis was on volume. Their first principle was to always have more shots than their opponents, even if that meant shipping more wides. By increasing their output, wides came at a smaller cost. That forced all of their putative rivals to play the same numbers game.
Nobody in football has adopted that approach. Efficiency was always king, not volume. With the turn the game has taken the actuaries in every back-room team must be forced to revise their view of risk. If these rule changes alter the future of the game, that is how it will be done.
In the Cork-Westmeath game on Saturday, Eoghan Cormican pointed out that there were an astonishing 60 shots from play, and of the 34 scores only two had been from dead balls.
Hallelujah.
