Gaelic football: often the antithesis of Riverdance

A question for sports buffs? What had the Galway Racing Festival, the Women"s British Open Golf and the Hungarian Grand Prix got in common last Sunday? Answer - they were all being televised live on RTÉ 1, BBC 2 and UTV respectively at the time the Kildare and Fermanagh senior football teams in Croke Park had served up the most putrid 20 minutes of sport imaginable on RTÉ 2. I know this useless information, because I checked the alternatives at the time and, incidentally, I can confirm that the Coronation Street omnibus, its EastEnders equivalent, Million Dollar Babies and T4 On The Beach were the other options on TV 3, BBC 1, TG 4 and Channel 4 at the time.The Lilywhites and the Ernesiders were giving Gaelic football a bad name from 2 pm onwards in Jones" Road and there are few worse spectacles in sport than misplaced passes, poor fielding and, in particular, wayward shooting from both frees and open play in the big ball game. Apparently, a respected analyst/commentator, whose function was to work on the Kerry v. Monaghan match, arrived in Croke Park around 2.20 and glanced at the scoreboard. He then turned to the steward and said: 'This has the makings of a bad day for me, the scoreboard isn"t even working.' However, in a flash, the official replied: 'No the scoreboard is working fine - it"s just the Kildare and Fermanagh players who aren"t.'Yes, the 20 minutes which preceded had failed to yield a single score and included as poorly-struck a penalty as you could ever witness from the normally deadly John Doyle (who later, to be fair, showed several glimpses of his undoubted class en route to a workmanlike Kildare win). Poor Fermanagh were, well just that, poor. The recent journey to Omagh for Westmeath"s game against Tyrone showed us just how much this year"s progress meant to the supporters of Malachy O"Rourke"s troops and even some white road markings were repainted to green and white. Perhaps the accurate road painters should have been togged out on Sunday because those who proudly donned the round-neck green and white jerseys lacked any semblance of accuracy in front of goals (as, sadly, was the case in both the drawn and replayed Ulster finals).A day earlier, the Wexford v. Down game wasn"t a pretty sight earlier (even if Wexford deserve enormous credit for grinding out a noteworthy win so soon after their Leinster final mauling by Dublin). The regular RTÉ Sunday Game panellists, Colm O"Rourke and Joe Brolly slated the fare on offer on the Saturday afternoon and the mind boggles as to what the former Meath and Derry corner forwards would have made of Sunday"s pukiest of puke football, with the milder duo of Anthony Tohill and Martin Carney still perplexed and almost speechless, given what they had witnessed. If the assertion of former Wexford supremo, Liam Griffin that 'hurling is the Riverdance of sport' holds true (and a recent diversion to Thurles after Westmeath"s win in Ardfinnan to see the Cork v. Galway classic Qualifier confirmed for me that it is) then some Gaelic football games this summer were more akin to drunken late night waltzes and foxtrots at a typical Irish wedding.Westmeath"s style in 2008 has not been pretty but has been pretty effective and we can"t take the high moral ground in condemning puke football but, significantly, we are very close to the top just now and are only, at most, a couple of starting players and a few more impact subs short of being genuine contenders for Sam in 09. It is now an interesting exercise to reflect on some views on the tactical changes in football of late, where a massive emphasis on physical fitness and buzz terms like "upper-body strength" seem to have replaced the honing of basic catch and kick skills. Arguably the game"s greatest-ever exponent, Mick O"Connell is quoted as saying: 'It was no accident that some of the best games of the 1950s and early 1960s were those in which the Dublin team was involved. Their attractive brand of combination football was almost totally constructive and they were never wont to adopt spoiling tactics to beat the other side.' Ominously, however, the Kerry legend concluded: 'This was probably their undoing in not harvesting more championships, but it was certainly conducive to open, continuous football.' Clearly, Kevin Heffernan the player learned his lesson by the time he became Heffo the manager as, apart from the coup of pulling Jimmy Keaveney off the barstool in St. Vincent"s, his next best move for his ground-breaking team of the 1970s was to litter the side with hard men - ask Mickey Ned O"Sullivan.One of O"Connell"s former team-mates and the game"s longest-serving and most successful manager, Mick O"Dwyer made an interesting observation some 30 years ago when his magnificent Kerry team was at the height of its powers. 'I think Down did a lot of damage to Gaelic football. They broke the ball a lot and they played it very close and marked tightly. They weren"t playing the ball that much but they played the man quite a lot. I suppose it paid dividends for them. They fouled men in the centre of the field and won All-Irelands with it. But it was not a good thing for the game,' the Waterville maestro opined.I"ll leave the final words with two famous ex-hurlers. Cork"s Donal O"Grady declared at a hurling symposium in 2003: 'Gaelic football is like rugby league, rugby union and soccer in that it"s three-quarter pace stuff'. Star Tipperary defender from an earlier era, Tony Wall went further and announced that 'football is a game for those not good enough to play hurling.' Let"s hope that Kerry, Dublin, Tyrone, Galway, Armagh, Wexford, Cork and Kildare can restore our wavering faith in the big ball game in the weeks ahead.