JOE BROLLY: Piggery in the middle

CONOR ‘Sketches’ Moore has a skit where he mocks me as a name-dropper. I don’t know where he got that from.

On the evening of the 2024 All-Ireland final between Armagh and Galway, I chatted with the Taoiseach, then took a phone call from President Biden. That night, I had a drink with the music promoter Peter Aiken and his good friend Bob Doyle, the manager of Garth Brooks.

It was Bob’s first ever Gaelic football match. “What did you think of it?” I asked him. “It was a wonderfully exciting occasion,” he said, “apart from the game.”

Shortly after that, in September 2024, an angry Niall Moyna (who played a key role in Pat Gilroy’s transformation of Dublin) said: “Gaelic football is now probably the most boring game in the world to watch.” Which is precisely how Kieran McGeeney liked it.

That 2024 final was the most boring spectacle in the history of All-Ireland finals. In the end, Armagh won it by a point, 1-11 to 0-13, in a game that was instantly forgotten. No one – save for when the Armagh players have a reunion now and again, or at the 25 years’ Croke Park name and wave – remembers anything about it. As my late grandmother Margaret Corey was wont to say, “It would make a dog eat its granny.”

Galway and Armagh got to that final because they were experts in boredom. Each player in their football factories simply performed their task, like workers on the assembly line putting caps on bottles. With the old rules, strong-minded managers controlled every aspect of the game leaving only a tiny margin of chance.

This was exemplified by the senior club finals. In 2020, a very limited, unexceptional group of players from Kilcoo almost beat Corofin, the most inventive club team in history.

Kilcoo’s formula was a masterpiece of boredom, a strategy that made the boring priest in Father Ted seem charismatic. One of the Branagan brothers famously gave an interview to the BBC where he said, “I never watch football myself” (surprise surprise).

By half time in a horrific game, Kilcoo were up 0-3 to 0-2, with one point coming from play (two minutes into injury time).

When the final whistle in normal time was blown, after a mind-numbing nine minutes of injury time, it was 0-7 to 0-7. Corofin finally found a way in the extra period, but the GAA community’s reprieve was short lived.

The following year, in another thoroughly modern final, Kilcoo beat an equally boring Kilmacud by a point.

Kilmacud went off and worked hard enhancing their boredom after that, had another look at the physics and came back to defeat Glen (another team expert in the art of boredom) in the final the next year by a point. A year later, Glen won the final by a point.

This sequence of finals illustrates the point that the game had become absolutely formulaic. Coaching focussed on the minutiae of positions in the blanket defence, holding possession via endless hand-passing, free-taking and kick-outs without risk.

These beaten finalists came back the following year and with a marginally enhanced formula, went from losing by a point to winning by a point.

Kieran McGeeney is annoyed with the new rules because with them, there is zero possibility of Armagh winning an All-Ireland.

In last year’s quarter-final, when Kerry finally realised this, they unleashed a 14-point avalanche without reply that buried Armagh.

“If only we didn’t have to kick the ball out,” said McGeeney ruefully, after Kerry won 11 Armagh kick
-outs in a row on the way to scoring 0-32.

Malachy O’Rourke, another expert in the blanket defensive formula, is similarly struggling. He won an endlessly tedious Ulster Championship in 2013 with Monaghan, a game we left at half time.

Then, he turned Glen into a winning team with the same formula.

Last year, he and his Tyrone team were lost with the new rules. They were relegated to Division Two and are struggling in Division Two, with three points from four games, beaten by Louth (oh dear) and only Darragh Canavan taking the bad look off them.

The game had become more boring than curling, which is just glorified floor-sweeping.

In a true sense, it was anti-football. By this I mean that the more boring a coach could make it, the better their chance of winning.

Jim McGuinness’ formula was copied and enhanced at all levels until there was no game left. The core of this successful strategy was to remove risk. To eradicate contests. To run down the clock. To defend with 14 players, without having to actually defend at all. To keep the ball endlessly, hand-passing it back and forth over the head of the outnumbered attacker (piggery in the middle?)

Now, the game is electrified. It is rocking. The senior club final was the best I have ever seen.

Week in, week out we are amazed by the comebacks, the skills, the high fetching, the goals. And of course the kick-outs.

In the recent epic contest between Galway and Kerry, it came down to the last kick-out. As it sailed up into the air, we held our breath.

If Galway got their hands on it, they would surely win it. If Kerry did, they would try to get it to Clifford and when he gets it, normality is suspended.

But that’s the thing with the new rules. When the final whistle went, it didn’t matter which team won. We all won. We are all winning. At every level, every day. Except Kieran McGeeney.