Appropriately for the week of Shrove Tuesday, the FRC must reflect on the fact that you can’t make pancakes without breaking eggs.
What had been something of an extended honeymoon for the new rules deteriorated into fractiousness at the weekend with a few belts being handed out after matches by various managers.
A few of these were to do with the communication of tweaks or emphases and it is easy to sympathise with that, given the importance of managers in turn explaining the unfolding rules to their teams. But it’s the same for everyone and this league was always going to involve some extemporising.
Maybe it is also explained by the imminence of the year about to turn serious.
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Meath’s Robbie Brennan at least had the decency to give out having won a match – just about – but his was a pretty comprehensive denunciation of the whole project: “I don’t like it; it’s not Gaelic football.”
His evidence for this startling claim?
“You check a score at half-time of a game and it’s 17-0 to somebody, it’s a joke to be honest with you the way it’s gone. It’s a mix of outdoor basketball with a breeze, soccer-style defending with 11 behind the ball in zonal stuff, and a bit of rugby thrown in for a few scrums around the middle.”
He could have thrown in cricket given the new phenomenon of teams chasing totals in the second half of windswept contests, while some others appear effectively to ‘declare’ their half-time lead.
The big turnarounds in matches, though, have tended to come from strong breezes, an occupational hazard at this time of the year. For many spectators and those watching on television, the enabling of teams to chase big totals has been one of the great fascinations of contests under the new rules.
They have influenced proceedings by the availability of two-pointers because even if both teams get the same amount of time to shoot into the same goals, the adrenalin rush of dismantling a deficit two points at a time has been considerable.
Then there is the one piece of up-to-date data from the Games Intelligence Unit that must be akin to a memento mori for all managers: round four of the league returned a long kick-out frequency of 80 per cent. That’s four out of every five restarts thrown into the hazard with no guarantee of getting the ball back.
If the opposition are on a scoreboard roll, it’s far harder to break the momentum by minding the ball for a little while.
The ‘17-0’ was presumably a reference to Salthill where Galway led 0-17 to 0-1 at the break and survived Donegal’s pursuit in the second half. But for the average observer, the fact that there was still any element of intrigue in the match was entirely down to the possibilities of the FRC rules.
It was odd to hear Brennan being so negative about everything given how transformed Meath have looked under his guidance so far this season, but it appears to be a genuine aesthetic disagreement.
As for the “soccer-style defending with 11 behind the ball”, it’s only a few months since 15 behind the ball was commonplace – or indeed, 16, as he probably remembers from the 2023 club final.
The FRC are currently mid-process, having deliberated on what tweaks or amendments need to be made before finalising the regulatory framework for this year’s championship.
Although the intention is to have the updated rulebook ready for round six of the league, there are no plans to implement it for the final two matches despite the value to teams and managements of getting a run at the rules, even if any tweaks are as expected, minimal.
The argument that introducing the tweaked rules in rounds six and seven would have undermined the league’s ‘integrity’ doesn’t survive too much scrutiny when viewed through the lens of what was always going to be a season of experiment and which has seen guidelines issued during the league.
Of the flagged issues, probably the priority is to put right the anomaly that has arisen when black or red cards reduce a team’s number and yet they are allowed borrow from the 3 v 3 structure to stay at full strength in the middle sector.
Goalkeepers may be assigned an added obligation when pushing forward to create the 12 v 11 imbalance, by being forced either to kick-pass or cross the 45-metre line if they want to handpass.
You would, however, imagine the data that most vexes the FRC concerns the stubbornly high handpass to kickpass ratios.
As Paul Earley, veteran of a previous FRC, pointed out on these pages, given the stated desire to restore the balance between a vertical game and a horizontal game – repeated on Tuesday morning by FRC chair Jim Gavin on Morning Ireland – that ratio needs to reduce.
Earley also argued that giving goalkeepers licence to roam in the other half and insert themselves into apparently endless, pass-the-parcel movements has definitely prevented meaningful reduction of the number of handpasses – even if they are now mostly to be seen in attack rather than at the back.
The imbalance caused by wandering goalkeepers would probably have been ironed out this summer, but the resulting outbreaks of handpassing just outside the 40-metre arc would, in all likelihood, have continued.
Finally, the fuss over timing the kick-outs could surely have been avoided without resort to sticking the 20-second metric on what is a specified ‘guideline’, particularly when, again as referenced by Gavin on RTÉ, the first four weekends have registered an average time of 21.5 seconds – well compatible with a 20-second guideline – even before last week’s advisory was issued.
