Dolan says FRC rule enhancements make football 'a better product'

By John Harrington

Dessie Dolan believes the Football Review Committee’s proposed rule enhancements which will be trialled in this weekend’s Allianz Interprovincial series are timely and necessary.

The former Westmeath manager takes charge of the Leinster team for the four-match series and is delighted action is finally being taken to improve the sport of Gaelic football as a spectacle.

Having seen them play out at first-hand when Leinster held an in-house trial game last weekend, he’s confident the proposed rule enhancements will have a positive impact.

“There is a frustration there with the rules currently,” says Dolan. “That they are not fit for purpose. Frustration is building up. It's very hard to break down teams. It's very hard to get the scores and the spectacle of football is not good.

“I do think when you look at the rules and look at the presentation, there is a lot to take on board, a lot of changes. But when you watch the game, it doesn't feel like a different game, it feels like a better game.

“More open, more opportunities, more one-v-one, more long range shooting. It definitely feels like a much better product.

"To be fair to Jim Gavin he has done a very thorough job. He has identified the weak points of the current game and he has got solutions for all of those weak points and it feels like he has answers to the problems of the game, in terms of what's happening on the pitch.

“When I played here, the goalkeeper kicked it long, the midfielders generally caught it or broke it and then I had to be out in front of my man one-on-one.

“In my day, I was taking on Anthony Lynch and Sean Marty Lockhart and there were a lot more corner-forwards that you would recognise. You had Gooch, Padraig Joyce, Declan Browne. Nowadays it feels like the corner-forward, you'd struggle to identify them because they get so little ball. It feels like a throwback to a better time, a better product.”

Better, Dolan believes, than the product football has become in recent years. What does he think is the biggest problem with the modern game?

"I would say the condensed nature of the defence,” he says. “Trying to break down 15 players. It's very difficult. I would imagine the players are frustrated going over and back an awful lot.

“You can hear the groans in the crowd and there could be two or three minutes where nothing is actually happening, only they (players) are trying to figure out how to break this down.

“That's the main frustration. The three up top corrects it. You'd say you can still have 11 players back, and you can, but it's not 15 so there is more space available but equally if the ball breaks down and you look up, there are players up the pitch to kick it to.”

It’ll be interesting to see which of the proposed seven rule enhancements will have the biggest impact, but it’s easy to believe the limit on passing to the goalkeeper will be up there.

Goalkeepers may only receive a pass from a teammate if they are inside the opposition half, or if they and the player passing the ball are inside their large rectangle.

Frequently, teams in possession of the ball inside their own half of the pitch are recycling the ball back to their goalkeeper - sometimes when the player in possession is being tackled by the opposition and sometimes just to slow play down.

This often causes the opposition forwards to retreat back inside their own half of the pitch rather than press up on the opposition and so the cycle of predictable, possession-based football begins anew.

Now that defenders don’t have the easy out of passing back to their goalkeepers there’s a good chance the opposition will press aggressively, forcing contests for possession and turnovers. Life is about to get a lot more complicated for corner-backs and full-backs.

"I was talking to Eoin Murchan, I said 'you're on your own out there’”, says Dolan. “It's very difficult to create plus ones and that's what managers love to do, if you create that, you are blocking up the central channel and you have that comfort zone back there.

“It's hard to generate plus ones. Because of that then it's man on man, so Eoin said 'yes I understand it's man on man but I am actually enjoying the challenge, the art of defending.' Which is something probably lost on a few lads now because defending is now defending in numbers as opposed to defending individually.”

Dolan believes that recent club matches such as last weekend’s televised Derry SFC semi-final between Newbridge and Magherafelt underlined why the FRCs proposed rule enhancements are so badly needed.

“I actually watched the match on Saturday night to see could it get any worse as a spectacle because it was so poor to watch,” says Dolan.

“If people feel that’s the way the GAA should go, that’s fine but there is an alternative and I think Jim Gavin is basing his alternative on facts of the game.

“A lot of his information is factual, data driven and the solutions really credible. The only thing I’d say is that there is a lot of commentary around it from people who have seen the rules and there is a lot of them but have yet to see them in action. I think people will be pleasantly surprised when they actually observe the games

“I would say to people not to judge these rules until you have seen them in practice. It doesn’t feel like you are looking at new rules; it just feels that you are watching a really good game of football. That’s it in a nutshell.”