The task facing the Football Review Committee is a Herculean one, but removing areas of ambiguity in the game would be a step in the right direction

GOOD LUCK to Eugene McGee. Taking charge of a committee with the remit to review football sounds like the sort of labour that would have broken the spirit of Hercules but the man who produced and directed the biggest show stopper in modern All-Ireland history is well equipped for the task with his range of perspectives – developmental at UCD, intercounty managerial with Offaly and Cavan and journalistic with a number of publications and broadcasters.

Football is complicated. It’s by far the most successful of the GAA’s sports, reaching out nationally with an broad geographical spread throughout areas where hurling is still dependent on missionary work.

It has its hot spots but at least half of the counties in all of the provinces have won senior All-Irelands. It draws the biggest crowds and generates the greater portion of the GAA’s revenues and yet for all of this dutiful endeavour, the big ball game can sometimes seem like the prodigal’s brother.

Whereas football’s shortcomings are routinely highlighted, hurling is promoted as the game that makes the GAA truly special. At one stage an association president when addressing the pre-test dinner during an International Rules series, digressed in order to preach to the bewildered Aussies about hurling being the best game in the world – despite the occasion being a celebration of no fewer than three other sports.

Initiatives to curb indiscipline in the games have in the past been dismissed as appropriate only to football, as the problem doesn’t apply to hurling, despite that contention being simply untrue.

The football community could be forgiven for feeling unloved. This chippiness explains some of the reactions to new president Liam O’Neill’s initiative in establishing the football review group. But high-powered deliberative processes with a view to facilitating debate are both healthy and desirable.

You don’t have to view football negatively to acknowledge that improvements could be made. In fairness to the president, his widely quoted response to a question at a press conference was not an arraignment of the game but simply an acceptance that certain aspects of it – defensiveness and excessive use of the hand pass – are boring.

On the positive side he said that there are frequently “great games of football” and it’s hard to disagree on either count.

The likely problem with the review of the game is that finding a consensus within the association at large on what might be done to improve things will be difficult, but there’s plenty to talk about.

Entertainment has never struck me as the strongest argument on the matter. Football and hurling are amateur sports and draw their energies from the passionate allegiance to locality, be it parish or county. Managers and players aren’t paid so the idea that they are obliged to put on a show for the spectators is unsustainable. Teams go out to win and their only constraints are the rules and – you’d hope – a sense of sportsmanship, but in competitive games the latter can be hard to uphold.

Tweaking the rules to make teams play differently for purely aesthetic reasons is problematic but there are legitimate issues at the heart of how football is played and they will presumably occupy Eugene McGee and his committee when it is fully empanelled.

The most serious of these concerns relate to ambiguity and ambivalence. A key area of football is shrouded in ambiguity. The tackle allows virtually no physical contact – apart from fair shoulder challenges – with an opponent and is specifically defined as being on the ball rather than on the player.

That was just about feasible when the ball was in play for greater periods of the match but in modern football, which has evolved into a possession-based game in which the hazard of contested ball is far more limited, challenging an opponent without committing a foul can be impossible under the rules.

There’s a frequently heard lament about “taking physicality out of the game” but there’s scarcely any physicality mentioned in the rule book that isn’t an infraction so technically it’s not there to be taken out in the first place.

What has emerged is a game that referees interpret as best they can, balancing the needs of continuity and of fair play. Clearly that’s a difficult task even before disciplinary issues are refereed. Then they get berated for inconsistency despite the fact that they can only apply the rule book they are given. It’s like handing people a plumber’s manual and asking them to perform brain surgery – and blaming them when things go wrong.

Clear re-definition and regulation of what contact should be permissible would be a major outcome to these deliberations.

Ambivalence underpins the disciplinary problem. Raising this can cause irritation and misapprehension. No one’s saying that football – and in this case, hurling – isn’t better behaved than it was in the old days and no-one’s saying that out-and-out violence is a persistent phenomenon but indiscipline still blights the games.

Liam O’Neill knows this better than most. His committee on disciplinary reforms initiated an experimental set of rules that reduced fouling and increased scoring – and without changing the playing rules at all. The idea was ingenious and simply stiffened the penalties for foul play – in other words tilting the balance of advantage from the aggressor to the aggrieved.

It would be easy to dismiss cynically the refusal of the 2009 Congress to endorse these proposed reforms but that would be unfair to the large majority which backed the initiative – just seven short of the required two-thirds majority – and the many passionate contributions from the floor that called on the GAA to protect skilful players, kids up to adults, from pulling, dragging, tripping and all of the dismally familiar cynicism.

It’s possible to share the misgivings of those who don’t want football to be genetically engineered to elevate the importance of certain skills over others but nonetheless to support the rights of everyone to play by the rules. For that to happen, the rules must be clear and as far as possible unambiguous and the disincentive to break them must be so strong that foul play will decisively disadvantage both miscreants and their teams.