There were many words spoken in Croke Park last weekend. Dessie Farrell said goodbye with the grace befitting the biggest job in the GAA. Jack O’Connor revealed himself to be an avid reader of Darragh Ó Sé’s Irish Times column.
But the most enlightening quote of them all came from Meath manager Robbie Brennan discussing Jordan Morris, his mercurial corner-forward who tormented Galway in the third of the weekend’s All-Ireland football quarter-finals.
“As I keep saying, there’s a touch of genius about Jordan . . . He is impossible to mark at times, literally impossible to mark. Other times you can have a little turnover, but they’re what we call creative turnovers, aren’t they? You’re allowed to have them when you’re that type of player.”
There has been a surfeit of jargon injected into the bloodstream of Gaelic football over the years, but “creative turnover” is just a beautiful, evocative phrase. It is the ‘shrug shoulders’ emoji brought to life in a sporting context.
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Brennan reckons you’re allowed have them when you’re that type of player. But let’s face it, you haven’t been allowed them in a very long time in Gaelic football. And there has been no such thing as a “little turnover” in the last 10 years.
Morris was unstoppable last Sunday, a fly in the ear of the Galway defence for the entire game. It takes some testicular fortitude to hit 1-6 after missing your first three shots on goal. The game is about players like Jordan Morris, if it’s about anything. And the game has been given back to players like him.
Eoin McElholm burning Ciarán Kilkenny on the outside and kicking a score in the last 10 minutes of Dublin v Tyrone has already been pointed out in these pages as an abiding memory of the four games last weekend. But the quarter-finals were all defined by moments of outstanding enterprise and invention – whether that was Michael Langan’s thunderous shot against Monaghan, Morris’s match-winning turnover for his goal or Seán O’Shea’s wondrous display of outside shooting.
Players now have the room to try things. When Morris sells a dummy, he’s through on goal, not running head-first into two more defenders. When Langan takes the ball at speed, he just needs to beat one defender to get a goal-scoring opportunity, not four. If you have the conviction to take on your man, there’s space in behind him. We don’t want it to be easy for the best forwards, we just want to reward them for their creativity. And that is what the game is now doing.
They were all, at various stages, consumed by the glorious uncertainty of the kickout. Shaun Patton’s struggles in the first half against Monaghan didn’t cost Donegal this time, but the three remaining teams will have been watching closely. It was a total systems failure.
Ethan Rafferty’s woes against Kerry were well documented, but Shane Ryan was the only one of the two to concede a goal, and that from a short kickout that went awry. Morris’s goal against Galway could hardly be blamed on Conor Gleeson, but Johnny McGrath was stripped of the ball after he had gathered possession deep inside his own 45 running away from any of his teammates.
The kickout is now a bewilderingly pressurised situation, like standing on the 18th tee at Augusta 30 times in every game. Some goalies look like they’ve been preparing their whole lives for this moment, while others look decidedly less comfortable. In situations where you feel over-matched, it’s easy to launch it out long and make it someone else’s problem. In those situations, the high fielders are rewarded for winning 50/50s, but the game also rewards the keepers who force the short ones and maintain possession for their team. Bravery is incentivised everywhere.
Watching the wonderful RTÉ documentary Hell For Leather over the last few weeks, you’d have been forgiven for wondering how the great players of the past would fare in the 21st century. It used to be an impossible question to answer – how to compare eras.
But now we can watch Kerry v Armagh from last year and Kerry v Armagh from this year and it’s like a different sport. We have all probably wondered since he started his intercounty career how David Clifford would have gotten on in a different era. Now, all of a sudden, we know (7 goals, 44 points and counting).
There are straws in the wind worth noting. The death of a dominant Dublin is not as important to a revitalised game as the new rules, but it would also be foolish to discount the absence of an over-dog from this year’s championship. The key to how the game has flourished has been the Football Review Committee’s flexibility. If they saw something that clearly wasn’t working this year, they were able to fix it on the fly. After this winter, that won’t be possible. That will present challenges.
But try picking the All Star forward line right now. Michael Murphy, the Cliffords, Seán O’Shea, Darren McCurry, Rob Finnerty, Shane Walsh, Con O’Callaghan, Ciarán Kilkenny, Jordan Morris, Mathew Costello, Pat Havern, Micheál Bannigan, Ruairi Kinsella, Rory Grugan, Oisín Conaty. They’ve all given us moments of magic, as well as a few creative turnovers. But the game is theirs again. And that means it is ours, too.
