Cork and Limerick produce epic but hurling still has issues to tackle
By Kevin Egan
If there is anyone out there who expects either of this weekend’s All-Ireland senior football semi-finals to offer anything like the same level of entertainment as Cork’s momentous victory over Limerick last Sunday, I haven’t met them yet.
Even those who would quite clearly put football as their preferred sport ahead of hurling would freely acknowledge that what the two Munster rivals produced was an incredible spectacle, and as fitting a championship exit as one could imagine for a Limerick team that has raised the bar in terms of how the game can be played.
Former Dublin manager Jim Gavin is chairing a group that has been specifically tasked with looking at Gaelic football and examining what can be done to make it a more attractive sport to play and to watch. This clearly shows an understanding that while there has never been more athleticism, skill or tactical awareness in the sport, the problem is that those attributes are being used to greatly reduce the number of contests for possession in the game. From a viewing perspective, that’s not a positive development. Whisper it quietly, however, but hurling looks as if it’s on the cusp of having a similar problem, if it doesn’t already.
No doubt, there will be a lot of readers who will need to pause to gather their outrage in response to that last statement. Like Taylor Swift, floury spuds and the state of Israel, there are certain things that one cannot criticise, for fear of drawing the attention hordes of furious supporters, baying for vengeance – and the state of modern hurling is very much in that category. Moreover, how is it possible to criticise a sport after it has just provided a spectacle like that which was produced in Croke Park last Sunday?
The answer is that the level of skill on show from Cork and Limerick, and indeed the outstanding refereeing performance from Thomas Walsh, covered up every blemish – but as we move down the pecking order to lower tier inter-county games, club and underage games and the rest, the quality will diminish but the problems will remain.
On the playing side, we’ll lead with a truly eye-popping statistic. In last Sunday’s game, there were 102 shots for scores, when wides, saves, shots dropped short and scores are all tallied together. That’s a lot of breaks in play, but it was masked by the fact that Walsh allowed both keepers to simply restart within a second of the sliotar crossing the end line.
An elite referee that is passing Croke Park’s increasingly high fitness standards and is aided by two linesmen and four good umpires, can do this. The majority of local refs would have to choose between letting a lot of play happen when they don’t have eyes on it, or waiting around for the next break in play that isn’t a puckout to mark a score in their notebook.
The high number of breaks in play were also masked because Walsh took a very lenient approach to tackling, an approach which is simply not afforded to players outside the top eight or ten counties in the country. Moreover, at the lower grades, the game couldn’t be played that way, because not every defender can ‘walk the line’ of legality as carefully as Limerick’s Declan Hannon or Cork’s Seán O’Donoghue. Imagine the ball going out of play that frequently, in a game where there are also 30 or more stoppages for frees?
Moreover, by far the most common way to force dispossessions now is to tackle in crowds, forcing either an overhold, or an imperfect attempt at a shot or a pass to a colleague. There were just eight successful hooks, blocks and flicks to dispossess a player on Sunday. In a world where not every team has professional levels of fitness and so group tackling is not as easy, are we headed for a football-style scenario where turnovers become about as common as overhead pulls?
Additionally, we saw a couple of very contentious “throw ball” calls last weekend, which is eminently forgivable since it took slow-motion replays for anyone to be able to decipher that there was a tiny element of separation before the strike. Again, what happens at the lower levels where the execution isn’t as crisp, but coaches still want to try and emulate the same style of play, so they encourage players to walk the line? Some referees will enforce rules, others will “let the game flow” and turn a blind eye, and no-one will know where they stand.
Patrick Collins and Nickie Quaid were impeccable in their distribution, but it was notable that on a playing field that is as large as is allowed in the sport, with no real wind to speak of, Collins was able to put the ball more or less on the Limerick 20m line consistently. By now, a 65 has become a handy scoring chance and scores from inside a player’s own 65m line are commonplace.
On Saturday evening in Banagher in the Offaly Division One Hurling League final, both Birr’s Eoghan Cahill and Belmont’s Adam Egan took on frees from their own 45m line, right out on the sideline, with Cahill scoring his. Two thirds of the pitch is now inside ‘the scoring zone’ and this also means that we can have lengthy delays while freetakers trot back 80 metres to take on the posts from way out.
We’ve seen in the world of golf how courses had to be extended to allow for increased power from players and the ball travelling much further – that’s not an option for the thousands of pitches all across Ireland, and suggestions to make the ball heavier don’t stack up either, particularly when we see Collins’ save to deny Aaron Gillane in the first half last Sunday. A heavier ball could have broken a rib for the Cork custodian in that case.
The solution seems obvious – a return to larger ‘ridges’ on the sliotar, meaning more wind resistance, and much greater likelihood of longer strikes tailing to one side or another, which would simultaneously reduce the range that the ball would travel, and decrease the accuracy of anything less than perfect strikes from long distance. But would supporters, players and Croke Park officials countenance such a future in a world where it has become accepted that a game with more than 50 scores is automatically preferable to a game that finishes 2-16 to 0-20? It’s far from certain that they would, much like it’s unlikely that fans would have the patience to work through the few months it would take to adjust to a new handpass rule.
Right now we have incorrect application of the steps rule based on an unspoken understanding that six or seven steps is okay, leading to controversy when players are correctly penalised. We have completely different interpretations of what’s permissible in the tackle, depending on what level of game is being played. We have wildly inconsistent views on the handpass which, in many instances, is simply impossible for any human referee to correctly enforce.
The sliotar is travelling crazy distances, one-on-one tackling is becoming pointless from the defender’s perspective, and while right now all of this is still not enough to counteract the sheer quality of modern inter-county players and the breathtaking spectacle they can produce, the same thing would have been said about Gaelic football 15 or 20 years ago.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if hurling could have the foresight to look down the tracks and tackle the negative aspects of the game’s evolution now, before it travels exactly the same path that football has walked?