PETER Schmeichel was one of the all-time great goalkeepers. It was hard to find a defect in Schmeichel’s game. Brilliant in one-v-one situations, amazing reflexes, strong on cross balls and a great organiser of his defence.
Without Schmeichel’s skills and big personality, Denmark wouldn’t have won the 1992 European Championships and Manchester United wouldn’t have been as successful during his time in goal for the club.
In many ways, the big Dane straddled two footballing eras: before and after the banning of the back pass rule that came into effect in ‘92.
When the goalkeeper was allowed to lift the ball from a team-mate’s pass, it was often used to waste time.
Two years earlier, Italia ‘90 was regarded as was one of the dourest World Cups in modern times.
So FIFA’s rule-makers got to work and identified the back pass to the goalkeeper as a major problem.
Like a lot of his peers, Schmeichel struggled with the new law. When he received a back pass, he didn’t have the feet to control it and so he often leathered it into row z.
At the time there was resistance to banning the back pass because some leagues were more afflicted than others by time wasting.
Italy was arguably the biggest culprit.
Italy had mastered ‘Catenaccio’ football – a very defensive-minded brand with a libero (sweeper) in place.
If Juventus were ahead in a game, goalkeeper Dino Zoff would roll the ball out to libero Gaetano Scirea and Scirea would roll it back to him.
There was nothing preventing teams from doing this - and so change came about.
Nobody quite knows the tipping point as to when a sporting body must intervene to change the rules and signpost the game towards an allegedly brighter, more positive road.
Enough people felt that Gaelic football had reached its own tipping point and so the Football Review Committee [FRC] was given a blank piece of paper to try and engineer a better, more exciting version of the game.
There are umpteen games and umpteen passages of play where teams were able to hold onto the ball for several minutes at a time.
Among many such passages of play, I recall Galway playing at The Athletic Grounds where they moved the ball from side to side for what seemed like an eternity, awaiting a small lapse in concentration in the Armagh defence so they could pounce and score a point.
Back and forth the ball went in and around Armagh’s 45-metre line while Armagh’s defence shifted like a very calm and controlled pendulum.
A coaching stalemate.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Some people loved the 2022 Ulster final between Derry and Donegal; others hated it. An intriguing chess match or a bore fest?
It depends on where you sit on Gaelic football’s wide spectrum. In crude terms, there are casual fans and there are coaches and players deeply invested in the game.
The casual fan generally wants to be entertained, and the deeply invested coach or player just wants to win.
Still, for the deeply invested coach or player, there is so much to be enjoyed from delving into the forensics of modern Gaelic football and the cause-and-effect of every move.
Fermanagh footballer Declan McCusker observed: “When you’re so involved in it, you’re watching to see who can, say, break down this defence or that defence, I enjoy watching that.”
The casual fan isn’t into the minutiae, and only sees meandering, dead periods of football.
Until Jim Gavin, Eamonn Fitzmaurice et al got together to plot a new way forward, it could be argued on one level that Gaelic football had become a coaching triumph.
From corner-back to corner-forward, the modern Gaelic footballer has never been more skilled.
All the puzzles and solutions have been copyrighted by the entire country. In other words, coaching hegemony had been achieved.
In an interview with The Irish News, respected coach Aidan O’Rourke commented: “As a spectacle, Gaelic football was becoming very predictable and samey.”
Many observers would nod in approval with O’Rourke’s assessment – but an important caveat to the Armagh man’s analysis is that he would prefer if Gaelic football was allowed to evolve naturally rather than by engineering something different to make it more appealing – possibly to the armchair fan, many of whom have either switched off or tune in for the last 10 minutes.
A similar debate in soccer circles is gaining a bit of traction. Every team wants to play like Pep. It’s been termed the ‘Pepification’ of football.
Or perhaps a slightly more derogatory phrase - ‘magnolia football’.
The prevailing wisdom of the day is that everyone must play out from the back, play through the lines, keep possession – especially wingers – and create a neat overload before mounting a meaningful attack.
And if you’re not playing the Pep way, then you’re behind the times. Coaches are afraid to break from the dominant view of how a game should be played.
You could easily apply O’Rourke’s “predictable and samey” observation to soccer right now.
Maybe Gaelic football needed braver coaches to step away from the coaching norms and, who knows, there might have been enough variety to say there was no need for the FRC to offer some shock treatment - an inevitable consequence that everyone will experience once the National Leagues get underway next week.
The GAA obviously felt a new set of ideas for Gaelic football needed to be formulated to make it a better spectacle.
The FRC may have gone too far, or it may have pitched it just right.
Or indeed, had Gaelic football reached its tipping point?
Time will tell.
Let the coaching innovation begin.
