Irish Motor Neurone Disease Challenge Game: Mayo 1-14 Monaghan 1-16
IF there’s anything to be learned from the friendliest of Saturday evening friendlies, it is that the measurement of football’s shape-shift will be over months and years rather than days and weeks.
In snow and freezing conditions that were borderline cruel on the really fresh fish sprung for the second half and met by hardcore sneachta, the old habits were dying pretty hard.
The first two quarters were the judgeable portion of the game, with a good handful of regulars on both sides.
It would be hypocritical to draw definitive judgement on 40 minutes of football that would contradict definitive judgements that are being made about exactly what these new rules are going to cause.
The first indication that Mayo have been trying to manipulate the rules to their favour was visible the moment the cameras were turned on.
The new 40-metre arc on the MacHale Park pitch ended more than five yards from the 45′. You’re talking maybe three or four yards shorter than it should be but for a team slapped about the face in recent years for their inability to kick anything over a packed defence (see recent meetings with Galway, the 2023 defeat by Dublin, this year’s loss to Derry).
Like Sam Allardyce’s Bolton or Mickey Harte’s Tyrone bringing their sidelines in, isn’t suiting their own capabilities just the point of home advantage?
Typically, given the fascination and the scaremongering, there wasn’t a score kicked from outside the arc.
There will, as the year goes on, grow a trend where wannabe-Sextons hang back in the pocket looking to manufacture two-pointers. But like raiding goalkeepers, the fleshing out of these rules could reveal both ideas to be exceptions rather than the rule itself.
Rory Beggan got on a bit of ball in the second quarter but it was when Monaghan were building slowly.
What was noticeable was when a shot dropped short, none of his defenders tended to come short looking a pass. They turned to head the other way, pulling their men away out of Beggan’s space. He can’t take a back-pass but he can carry a ball that comes his way of the attacking team’s accord. It did help them build their way out.
The obvious thing for the Mayo forwards to do was track their man but maybe the play was to press Beggan and make him give it to someone else, because there’s nobody more comfortable on the ball in uncontested spaces.
Old habits are going to find an agonising and slow demise.
Both teams fell victim to the 50m penalty when they had no need to. Frees in nothing areas became tap-overs.
Kieran Duffy slowed one up, held on to the ball a second, rolled it no more than a yard out of position, but there is no subtlety left in such behaviour. The line was drawn more starkly when a Mayo player set the ball on the ground half-a-yard away rather than handing it to his opponent.
When Rory Beggan attacked a final quarter kickout, Mayo won it and won a free. Monaghan obstructed its taking first and then held on to the ball a couple of seconds, by which stage the opportunity had gone. There was no 50m penalty. Consistency will be the big thing with it.
You can say it’s pernickety but players at every level will learn the hard way. It’s not hard to hand the ball back. It isn’t in the game’s culture and that will bring moral wrestling but the game will pin players who continue to do it down.
By round three of the league, the grief given for a 50m penalty will not be directed at referees. It will be directed at the player who didn’t give the ball back, by his management, his team-mates and the crowd.
For some players, it will be an excruciating process, extracting such cynicism from the core of their being. But they will do it, because they’ll no use to man nor beast if they don’t.
In all honesty, the game didn’t look a huge pile different. How could it? Because everything has to change.
For a decade, inside forwards have played on the loop. They hang wide, they come around for the second ball. Some of the best forwards in Ireland would panic if someone kicked them first phase-possession.
You can see that. They’re still hanging wide, still coming on the loop. Most teams are going to fall between stools this year. The opportunity is there to kick it more, to be more direct, to coach forwards to become ball-winners in their own right again.
But it will be like ripping out your wisdom teeth. Ten years of playing one way does not evaporate in the three months… er, sorry, four weeks since inter-county teams resumed training.
Defenders are continuing to defend goal-side and protect the space, and maybe will forever. It’s hard to argue with the logic behind it. But the rules do facilitate a higher press and reward it better, which is all you can ask.
Trends will begin to form through the league but just taking the small bit of game time there’s been thus far, between challenge games and the inter-provincials pre-Christmas, one thing teams will have latched on to is how dangerous it is to lose your own kickout.
Defensive teams are pushing right out and the forwards are following. But when the attacking team wins it, it’s a mad scramble into the vacant space. Goal chances are coming off it.
The most interesting individual performance of the lot was that of Sean Jones. He’s been chipping at a Monaghan career for a few years now without making the headway he’s capable of.
But there was a very distinctive McManusness about him tonight. Not quite in the levels but in his very mannerisms, from the movement down to the technique in the way he was kicking the ball with the follow-through and two feet off the ground.
He’s either been watching closely or listening intently, if not both.
It’s never a good idea to rush to judgement about anything on January 4.
But if there is one to be made, it’s that it will probably be months before we’re able to say anything definitive.
Mayo starting team: Colm Reape; Enda Hession, Donnacha McHugh, Sean Morahan; Fenton Kelly, David McBrien, Eoghan McLaughlin; Matthew Ruane, Dylan Thornton; Conal Dawson, Fergal Boland, Davitt Neary; Cian McHale, Ewan Duffy, Ryan O’Donoghue
Monaghan starting team: Rory Beggan; Ryan Wylie, Killian Lavelle, Dylan Byrne; Aaron Carey, Kieran Duffy, Kevin Loughran; Gavin McPhillips, Micheal McCarville; Ryan McAnespie, Barry McBennett, Michael Hamill; David Garland, Andrew Woods, Sean Jones