The release on Thursday of the football league fixtures for 2025 added to the sense of anticipation surrounding the new rules or “enhancements” that will be trialled next year.
For Football Review Committee (FRC) chairman Jim Gavin, whose group produced the proposals and guided them through last week’s special congress successfully, the prospect of the new season deserved a drumroll.
“I can only imagine the atmosphere in Salthill on the 25th of January when Galway take on Armagh. That’s going to be a cracking game. That’ll be a full house. Two All-Ireland finalists, it’s the top two teams in the country going head-to-head, only a couple of months after the All-Ireland final.
“And secondly, under these new rules for 2025, it’s going to be a great night.”
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For the most optimistic, the FRC’s enhancements could have the effect of colourising the game after decades of tactical analysis and evolution have reduced one of the national games to an ugly parody of itself.
These anxieties are not new. At various stages throughout its history, the game has prompted concern for its viability as a spectator sport and therefore its future. Within a decade of being drawn up by the GAA’s founding father Maurice Davin, the rules of football were being revised by then-general secretary Dick Blake.
It certainly went through a bewildering array of changes at the turn of the 20th century: scoring values brought the goal from being worth any number of points to five to the modern three; team numbers went from 21 to 15 by 1913 and the scoring system dispensed with the original outside posts, still seen in Australian rules.
More than 100 years ago, the Irish Independent asked: “Is it true, after all, that Gaelic Football is dying?”
There has always been this perception of football as a game constantly changing in search of a finished product.
That mission to formulate enjoyment has a long history. The 1971 McNamee commission warned that unless the games were “attractive to players and spectators, improvements in structure or methods of organisation will be of little use”.
In a way that restless history suggests a game not quite at ease with itself. Even the current iteration of reform and transformation is an ongoing project.
The 1990 football work group, chaired by Dublin’s Tony Hanahoe, addressed an average ball-in-play time of 11 minutes per half with a range of proposals to speed it up. The purpose according to Hanahoe was “to develop a more enjoyable game for the players and a more attractive spectacle for spectators”.
Some of its solutions have been enduring: allowing free kicks and line-balls to be taken from the hand, which definitely speeded up the game by reducing the amount of ceremony attendant on free taking and forcing opponents to pay attention because a quick free could catch them unawares.
That emphasis is again in the spotlight with the FRC’s “solo and go”, which allows a player to run the ball when a free is awarded.
What has marked out the current trialling from previous attempts to address football’s problems is its comprehensiveness. Last Saturday, 49 motions were passed — none fell either to rejection or withdrawal, an unprecedented strike rate.
Twelve years ago, one of the FRC’s predecessors, chaired by the late Eugene McGee, guided through several reforms but others were lost — some to be adopted at a later stage. That committee’s research revealed widespread concern about disciplinary issues and cynical play, which inspired their most famous intervention, the black card.
Concerns about discipline also surfaced this time and there are several measures to punish dissent and lack of sportsmanship — such as the 50m advancement of frees when challenged. For opponents, these are draconian impositions; for the FRC, they are appropriate discouragement of bad behaviour.
Paul Early is one of the most qualified coaches in football. A former Roscommon player and All Star, he has managed and coached at all levels up to intercounty and international rules. He was also the first high-profile GAA export to the AFL 40 years ago when signing for Melbourne.
A leading member of Eugene McGee’s committee, he is looking forward to the report’s implementation.
“It needed to be radical and there was a mood for change, everyone was so fed up with the game. The discipline piece is one that I’ve always been supportive of, as we had a very ill-disciplined game ... The committee has done a great job of bringing that to the surface and introducing new rules, which will hopefully change behaviour of players and managers towards referees. That too needed to be addressed.
“Twelve years ago, the view was that there was an issue around cynical fouling but the overall game wasn’t in crisis. Now, the game is in crisis and going down a very bad path. I think the opportunity was there to introduce a package of rules and people had reached a stage where they were willing to go with them.”
If there is a ghost at the feast, it is the FRC’s decision not to address the hand-pass. For many, it is at the heart of the game’s problems. It is the currency of the game’s evolution into possession-dominated play. Easy availability of unchallenged short hand-passes has enabled teams to hold the ball for minutes at a time.
“What has happened,” says Early, “is that players have got fitter and stronger and, in my opinion more skilful. It’s harder to dispossess opponents in the modern game and then you add to that, defensive strategies — men behind the ball and all that.
“The area between the goalkeeper and the opposition 45m line is where the bulk of the hand passing takes place, those elaborate necklaces of hand-passes. This new rule book should result in fewer hand-passes.”
If it doesn’t?
“If it doesn’t, the changes will have failed.”
One former All-Ireland referee, who didn’t wish to be quoted for this piece, says the problem is two-fold. “You’re talking about technique and proliferation. There are frequent fouls. It’s supposed to be a fist or else ‘a definite underhand striking action’. If the technique was refereed more strictly, there wouldn’t be as much proliferation.”
The training and educational process is already up and running with webinars available. Key targets are obviously, players and coaches and of course, referees, who even at club level are supposed to be enforcing the new rules no later than the end of March.
Early tells a story about Ric Charlesworth, an Australian hockey international, qualified doctor and former politician, who went on to have great success as a coach in the same game. As a member of the Australian Institute of Sport, he became a mentor for elite coaches on other games.
“I invited him over for an All-Ireland semi-final, I think between Mayo and Tyrone. All he could say to me during the game was: ‘how can one person on the pitch manage this? It’s a fast, invasive game’. He was saying to me that there should be three of them!
“That was his first and last observation even though he enjoyed the game and it reinforced my view.
“You need to be within 20m of the action, of the ball, if you’re going to make an informed decision. A second referee would facilitate that because there would be two officials within 20m of the ball and so, closer to the action.
When advocating two referees, Early says that he is generally met with the same response: “‘Sure it’s hard enough to recruit one referee a game.’” My counter is that if you make the game easier to referee, you make it more attractive. At the moment, who’d be a ref?
“It’s my one reservation about this upcoming trial. I’m happy with the rules but I worry about their implementation.”
One of the big selling points for the reforms was the argument that they would be under constant monitoring and, if necessary, review. Nothing would turn out to be so counterproductive with unintended consequences that it would not be stopped immediately.
In a year there will be a second special congress, which stands to be either a formality given the success of 2025 or a bleak realisation that, yet again, the problem of football has defied solution.
