IN the decade-and-a-half since Opta began collecting data on Premier League games, no team had ever failed to have a shot during a home game until Bournemouth managed it on Saturday.
Facing Pep Guardiola’s devastating Man City side, they had a plan. They defended their penalty area as if their lives depended on it.
When they got the ball, they hoofed it clear and sat there waiting for the next wave of pressure.
Not a shot on target, not a shot off target, not a corner did they win. Nothing.
Bournemouth have always been a decent side to watch under Eddie Howe, always tried to pass the ball on their magical journey from bottom to top. It’s brought them rewards they’d never have thought possible a decade ago.
On this occasion, they decided not to bother. Instead it was sit tight and pray. And they almost managed it too, succumbing to a 1-0 defeat that most would be happy enough to escape with.
Soccer has always had plenty of bad games to feast upon.
Rugby, the same. In a couple of years covering Ulster and Ireland, there were times when you felt like you were under general anaesthetic, particularly when the subs start rolling in the second halves.
Other times, they’re brilliant sports. It doesn’t always have to be open and free-flowing to be entertaining, but it does help.
That’s the nature of sport. Gaelic football’s no different.
There were always bad games in the past and there’ll always be bad games in the future.
Whether the percentage of them in comparison to good games has increased is a matter that public opinion will never settle on.
But there has been a marked increase in instances when coaches set their teams up with nothing only the negative in mind.
It’s not a statement you throw about loosely but last Friday really did seem like a very disheartening low for the sport.
To see a famous school like Abbey CBS send their Brock Cup team, a bunch of 14- and 15-year-olds, out to stand collectively as an entire 15 inside their own 45, refusing to come out and engage St Patrick’s, Maghera, was a stark indication of how far down the food chain the negativity has passed.
They wouldn’t come out and Maghera wouldn’t go in. And so the game finished 0-2 to 0-1. The Abbey actually kicked a late chance to equalise wide too. Had they landed it, it would have felt as though their approach had been rewarded.
It’s monkey see, monkey do. No doubt they’d seen the final four minutes of the first half of Tyrone’s win over Monaghan a week previous.
On that occasion, Monaghan implemented their black card template by putting all 14 behind the ball when Dessie Ward got 10 minutes in the sin bin.
The result was a period of absolute stalemate that was only comparable to the famous satirical soccer scene from The Simpsons.
These episodes are happening more and more regularly.
Modern coaching practices are routinely battered when these things happen. But as much as modern coaching has found a way to stand 15 men in front of its own goal, it’s also found a way through it.
Players are fitter, faster, stronger, better than ever. Think of how often now you’d see a corner-back comfortably float over a score from 25 metres, when past versions never crossed their own 45'.
So many of the advancements in recent years have been positive. But for every positive, someone will find a way to create a new negative.
And that means someone else having to find a way of circumventing it. Take the idea of the running game. Safe to say it isn’t universally loved, but it’s the rational attacking answer to the negativity of a team putting so many bodies in front of its own goal.
There is a quality in the coaching they’re doing. Any fool can get 15 men to stand, but there’s work done on their tackling, their positioning, their communication. Good defences don’t happen by accident.
That cannot be overlooked. Even in the bad, there is some good.
But sometimes there is no positive answer to the negativity. And so the stock answer to a side that’s losing and still putting 15 men back and refusing to engage has become the team on the ball passing it around endlessly outside that area.
It’s the smart thing to do, absolutely. But it’s an horrendous spectacle.
Negativity will always exist in coaching. Some of it is balanced. This column last week praised Rory Gallagher’s set-up in Fermanagh, and rightly so. They’ve found a way to shut opponents down and find a method of creating enough scores to win games.
They work exceptionally hard on the defensive side of the game, but at least they have some semblance of an attacking plan to go alongside it.
It’s the really, really overt negativity such as that displayed by the Abbey, or by Monaghan briefly, that we have to find a way to deal with.
A standard response to the Abbey video was “the rules aren’t the problem, it’s the coaches, get rid of them”.
Except how do you do that? Different coaches will use different tools. They’ll all have different resources at hand. You can’t expect them not to protect their own ends by doing whatever they need to in order to make their team competitive.
That’s the very nature of coaching.
Gaelic football’s problem is that some coaches keep finding new ways to be negative. You cannot root that out. It will always exist.
Other coaches try exceptionally hard to find the right way around it. Their work deserves to be credited.
But you cannot expect them all to abide by some moral code to play the game in the right spirit. It’s a notion based in pure fantasy. There’s too much self-interest.
A repeat of spectacles such as last Friday’s could be hugely detrimental to the GAA as they battle to keep hold of young players in an increasingly competitive market.
A school in Newry, a city that’s become a GAA wasteland, should not have to be made aware of that.
No school should.
Above all, teachers have a responsibility to the children at their hand, and part of that is that they enjoy physical activity.
That’s never been more important. It’s hard to imagine those young lads enjoyed much about last Friday.
The recent rules trials have, contrary to the outcry, been hugely positive.
The kick-out, the sideline kick and the attacking mark have all shown signs of improving the spectacle.
Equally, that the handpass limit was thrown out showed the need to write rules with the focus on rewarding the attacking team rather than punishing the defensive one.
There is no alternative to these latest developments but to look at further changes to the rules.
Quite how we do that can be debated high and low.
But we have to try, because subjecting underage footballers to this will only drive them into the embrace of other sports.