Nostalgia is a middle-age indulgence but when the past is all we’ve got to watch it’s good to see if Gaelic football really was better in the good old days.
Not ‘better’ better obviously. The overwhelming evidence from repeat showings of classic matches on RTÉ, TG4 and Eir in recent weeks is hard to argue with.
In terms of speed, strength, fitness and overall intensity, comparisons to even 20 years ago are as unfair as lining up a Ferrari next to a Datsun.
Go back further and the funereal pace of the games allows time to marvel at the buxom BMI’s of some of the star players.
However for instance watching the 1991 All-Ireland Final between Down and Meath in real time did produce pangs for one increasingly vanishing element.
Aside from interminable stop-start breaks for injury, roaring at the ref, and gulping oxygen, the real glaring difference was unpredictability.
There was an arbitrariness to the game whenever a player transferred the ball that’s all but unthinkable nowadays.
The ball being moved produced a new micro-tussle between at least two other players carrying out their own private battle: win enough of those one v one’s and superiority got gained.
Radar precision
It looks primitive now. Goalies put in goal to toe-poke the ball as far as possible – and because they can’t really play – have morphed into ‘Liberos’ pinging 40 metre targets with radar precision.
Certainly the idea of a series of one-on-one nowadays is enough to bring coaches out in hives.
Instead we have sweeping defensive zones, everyone hunting in packs to generate enough “transitions” so they can hang onto the ball for long enough to draw out the opposition and give viewers time to boil the kettle.
The game has advanced tactically. Whether it has improved as a spectacle is a different question.
Gaelic football has transitioned into a possession game and there is enough evidence from fossilised baggy “genasai” days of yore that spontaneity has been a casualty.
It’s a push to describe today’s “Tiki-Taka” version of the game as monotonous. But incessant recycled hand-passing can make for a very dull watch.
When the all-conquering Dublin team secures possession you are more or less assured they will retain it until they’ve scored. The surprise comes when they don’t. It is devastatingly quick and wonderfully assured. But you don’t have to be antiquated to pine for a one-on-one or two.
So on the basis of not letting a crisis go to waste this emergency might represent an opportunity for GAA bods to examine how to break the game back up in order to put it together better.
Peeping under blanket defences are zonally erogenous for coaches but make for a tedious spectator sport.
In comparison the past is a foreign, flabby, hairy, wheezy, brutish place. The camerawork is dodgy and vital statistics aren’t uniform. But it still somehow looks more natural.
English football did things differently in the past too. Like make its greatest stars dance on ice.
The Christmas clash of Manchester United and Derby County in 1970 took place on a pitch that appeared to be a nightmarish mix of a rink and the Ypres Salient.
Holy trinity
Even 50 years later it was almost possible to feel the wind cutting through a whip-thin George Best as he shivered in the warm-up. Alongside him, and also picking their way through the mud were the two other members of United’s holy trinity, Bobby Charlton and Denis Law.
The Derby team was led by Dave McKay, a midfielder acclaimed as one of the greatest ever by none other than Ireland’s own midfield maestro, Johnny Giles.
It’s fair to say that McKay’s BMI would probably have nutritionists today changing the batteries on their beep machines to make sure they weren’t wonky. The portly Scot carried a gut to make many of us feel slightly better about ourselves.
But not even a rotten pitch or a bad black and white picture could disguise what his brain and feet were producing.
Through a 4-4 thriller, McKay and Charlton took turns to dominate midfield. If either misplaced a pass it was probably only when the white ball disappeared into the frosty wings. In the muddy middle they were Pirlo-esque in their assurance.
That was no mean feat as commentator Kenneth Wolstenholme encouraged us to “remember, there’s only a precarious foothold for the players.”
In comparison Best was a largely superfluous presence. He did score an agricultural toe-in but although looking as glamorous as a 1970 Rolling Stone his attention already seemed elsewhere. The more bourgeois pair of McKay and Charlton were where it was at.
Their capacity to control and retain the ball in the conditions was remarkable, underlining how possession really was, is, and ever shall be, nine tenths of the soccer law.
McKay’s belly and Charlton’s comb-over are a stark contrast to the buffed physical paragons of today. Over 90 minutes your average Premier League workhorse will probably run twice the distance at three times the speed. That’s only to be expected.
But it’s the promise of the unexpected that keeps us watching.
