Advertisement Horse Racing TV Listings GAA Fixtures Behind the Lines Sportswriters discuss their careers and the work that inspires them. Rugby Weekly Extra Dive into all the news and analysis 3 times a week The Football Family Weekly insights from the week’s big talking points Advertisement More Stories The lesser-spotted contested kickout.Lorcan Doherty/INPHO Analysisfree at last Ignore the naysayers - new Gaelic football rules are breathing life into a dying game There is much that needs to be refined, but few can deny the potential for genuine excitement in new era. 6.16am, 9 Feb 2025 Share options Declan Bogue LOOK, MAN CANNOT live on bread alone. He needs some diversion. He needs distraction. Geezer needs excitement, innit? This man is no different. He is your classic Irish male. He will bottle up all his emotions, and on occasion, take them out on the drink. Such events lead to a period of self-reflection thereafter. Feelings are raw. Dehydration and acute anxiety are the inevitable results of such skites. This man needs sympathy, a scalp massage and none of his multiple children to approach. Under any circumstance. That’s the situation we were faced with last Sunday. But work was on the agenda, and a visit to the spectacular setting of Celtic Park for the visit of Kerry to Derry. Jack O’Connor admitted afterwards he had never been in Derry. Amazing. Anyway, given our tentative state, our fragility, we had a very specific afternoon in mind. Gaelic football in the last decade, or slightly more, had become a fairly simple game to cover. The ball went up the field. The team holding it pricked about for a while with one man holding a hand in the air. The other side filled in various spaces. Players pointed to spaces vacated. Others shuffled across to fill the spaces. Eventually, the attacking team would have a dig. It might go wide. It might drop short. It might go over. Ho-hum. It was what followed next that formed a large part of what our match reports and analysis might centre upon. The Kickout. Advertisement The opposing team might press their players up the pitch to prevent the goalkeeper getting a short kickout away. Then it would become ‘A Contest.’ You’d record what way that might go. Did a team win ‘Primary Possession? (a clean catch)’, or ‘Secondary Possession (a break ball)?’ And then you’d construct your match report to reflect how the result was shaped by those figures. If this all sounds a bit boring, then I’m sorry to say, that’s what Gaelic football was for the large part. A bit of a drag. An accountant’s dream. A sporting spreadsheet. Some writers are fantastic at covering this. At deciphering the hieroglyphics of the kickout and possession stats and turnovers and what have you. They can fling out their calculations and you’d instantly feel like you understood far more about Gaelic football than you had before you read that particular piece. That said, it’s a bit of a starchy diet. A little . . . dry. There’s a reason why textbooks don’t trouble the best sellers charts. Irish readers of sport have always been a slave to the killer line. A sucker for the big man with a nice turn of phrase. It wasn’t always the sportswriters that came up with them, either. Once when Joey Dunlop was asked about riding in the TT, he said, ‘There’s a grey blur and a green blur. I try to stay on the grey blur.’ A timely reference, but would Mikey Sheehy’s lobbed goal against the recently-departed Paddy Cullen even be as famous without being immortalised by Con Houlihan’s line that, ‘Paddy dashed back towards his goal like a woman who smells a cake burning?’ It’s the colour that Con was loved for. It was the colour that made Mícheál Ó Muircheartaigh a universally-adored figure. You wonder how either Kerry man would survive or stomach the modern era, with its mobile phone-confiscating managers and general tight-arsed attitudes. Anyway, a magnolia-coated day of regimented control and dour football would have suited us quite well last Sunday. No sudden noises. Nobody getting notions. Such games are easy to report on: the arm-wrestles, the ‘grimly compelling’ ones, the 0-12 to 1-8s. Whisper it, but it’s a cinch to write up that stuff. Few scores to note. You might count up the wides and shots dropped short and work out a percentage to show the percentage conversion rate of each team. It probably looks a hell of a lot more impressive than it is. Instead, what we had in Celtic Park was utter chaos. Four goals in the last seven minutes. Two in the last two minutes. Ben McCarron shoots for a two-pointer.Lorcan Doherty / INPHO Lorcan Doherty / INPHO / INPHO There was six goals and four clear goal chances. The long kickouts contested between Diarmuid O’Connor and Barry Dan O’Sullivan against Conor Glass and Anton Tohill produced feats of athleticism from the two Derry men who had both played Aussie Rules in the first half, before the Kerry men took over. By the 64th minute, Derry were five points ahead. Under the old rules, the game would have been seen out with a variety of methods to kill the contest; short kickouts, putting the ball in the fridge by using the goalkeeper as the outlet ball around the back, feigning injuries, turning every disputed free into a festival of pulling and dragging. Not all the new rules will survive. There will be some that are disputed, such as two points for a free outside of the arc. But others, such as solo-and-go and retaining three attackers in the opposition half, have already shown themselves to be the future. And in the coming weeks, the GPS data from teams is due to be released, ahead of the third round of league games, reportedly. We will come to that in time. For now, what the new measures re-introduce is the prospect of chaos. Of a game that can career and veer. One that is not under the control of a fella on a sideline who thinks he is the most important person in the entire stadium, with 15 chess pieces all under his remote control. So far, we have games where players aren’t afraid to colour outsides the lines. Games that come with a Jackson Pollock splat of colour. And you know what? Gaelic football deserves it. Declan Bogue Viewcomments Send Tip or Correction Embed this post To embed this post, copy the code below on your site Email “Ignore the naysayers - new Gaelic football rules are breathing life into a dying game”. Recipient's Email Feedback on “Ignore the naysayers - new Gaelic football rules are breathing life into a dying game”. Your Feedback Your Email (optional) Report a Comment Please select the reason for reporting this comment. Please give full details of the problem with the comment... 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