Jim Gavin has revealed his optimism about the Football Review Committee’s proposals, citing the performance of a Cavan player last week as proof of how good things can be.
The six-time All-Ireland winning Dublin manager is chair of the FRC who yesterday published a 204-page interim report containing over 50 proposed ‘rules enhancements’ for the game.
The entire suite of new rules will be used in the upcoming interprovincial competition at Croke Park and an upbeat Gavin said he feels ‘it’s just hard to see it not working’.
The FRC convened seven different ‘sandbox’ trial games in recent months, the latest of which was last weekend’s challenge in Mullahoran between Cavan and Kildare.
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Those games were used to inform the FRC members about which rules to keep, which to bin and which to tweak.
Gavin reported that ‘high-speed running is through the roof’, noted an increase in kick-passing and said that the ‘amount of shots on goal in last week’s match is beyond anything I’ve seen in recent years’.
Insisting on keeping three players high up the pitch and speeding up the play with solo-and-go restarts has created more space and led to the excitement.
Gavin pointed to the performance of one unnamed Cavan player as proof of how well the rules, which break up congestion and provide more space and room for one-on-ones, worked last Saturday.
“There was one player, a 21-year-old with Cavan, who scored about 1-3,” said Gavin.
“They were telling me that typically he wouldn’t survive in the modern game. He was very light. But he played beautifully on the pitch in tough conditions, got some great scores, won his own ball, took his man on, clipped a few scores and it was a joy to watch.”
Gavin, interestingly, said himself in a 2021 interview that Gaelic football was getting too close to Australian Rules football for his liking.
He pointed to the advanced mark at the time, saying that ‘we’re only one rule away from the game becoming like Australian rules, on a rectangular pitch’.
Speaking yesterday, he rejected the idea that the FRC proposals, which include an amended version of the advanced mark, as well as a recommendation that interchange players be considered, is nudging the game even closer to the AFL model.
“I would disagree with that completely,” he said.
“You still have to put the ball over the bar. In AFL, in fairness to the game, you can kick it wide and get a score for it. That’s their rule, I’m not criticising it.
“I believe when you see the (interprovincial) games, and I don’t want to bias people because that’s unfair, but when you see it, you’ll go, ‘Well there’s not too much different about that. That is Gaelic football, it’s not Australian Rules football, it’s not rugby league or soccer. That’s Gaelic football because you can kick it, you can get it, you can shoulder, you can hand-pass, you can go backwards, you can go forwards’.
“I believe that when you see it, and I would be very conscious of that particular point, that we don’t want to come up with something that isn’t the game we grew up with.”
Gavin said he has spoken individually to all of the inter-county managers. He said that while some of them had their own suggestions, and others wanted to tweak some of the proposals, the overall consensus was ‘Yeah, let’s do this’.
“That’s the feeling,” said Gavin, who believes that gaining the approval of Central Council on October 26, and then a Special Congress on November 30 will be trickier.
“The real test is Ard Comhairle,” he said.
“The Ard Comhairle members who represent the counties need to vote for it. Secret vote. They need to vote for it. Then it goes through to Special Congress. The same thing happens. So this is the easy bit, putting games on show is the easy bit.
“It’s when we’re here on the 26th going, ‘Okay, motion one, motion two, what are you gonna do? Motion three, what are you gonna do?’ And it’s not a case of, ‘They’ve given us 10 motions, sure we’ll just give them six’. That’s not how it works. And I’m very conscious that we don’t want to be that aggressive to say, ‘You have to vote for them all’. It’s their decision.
“But we’re presenting a package, really, of rule enhancements that when you see them play, you go, ‘Oh yeah, I can see how they work’. And in some ways, you shouldn’t even actually see them, you’ll just say, ‘That’s a good game of football’.”
