GAELIC Football's new mark hasn’t advanced the game at all, says Armagh manager Kieran McGeeney.
Two matches into what is shaping up to be an enthralling Division Two campaign, the Orchard county boss says the regulation – which awards forwards a free-kick if they catch a kick pass which has travelled 20 metres or more from on, or outside, the 45-metre line – serves no purpose other than being another reason to stop the game.
“For every score you get off it, it might cost you two or three going for it,” said McGeeney.
“You see fellas trying to look for marks and the ball being hit over (the forward’s head) and stuff like that.
“Everybody has their opinion on it but it’s hard to see anything other than the fact that we’ve brought another stop-start thing into the game but that’s what we do: We complain about the stop-start nature of the game so we bring in more rules for the referee to stop-start the game!”
Armagh and Laois had both scored from marks in their opening League games but Saturday night’s meeting between the sides at O’Moore Park did not feature a single attacking mark.
“People talked about mass defences, they were giving out the whole time, but sure it lasted for two years and now the average score for first division teams is around 20 points plus whereas if you go back 10 years you were averaging around 13-14 scores,” McGeeney pointed out.
“So we panic and we give out and we listen to people and make changes for the sake of it.
“I don’t see the merit in it. Maybe there’s something in it but I’m not sure what they were looking for.”
Armagh had earned rave reviews for dismantling Cavan in the first round of games and McGeeney expected much better from his players last Saturday night. But the misfiring Orchardmen trailed 8-2 at the break and, although they improved in the second half, Mike Quirke’s unfancied Laois side fully deserved their 0-16 to 0-10 victory.
McGeeney admitted that complacency or, as he put it, weight of expectation had played a part in his team’s below-par performance.
“It (complacency) does creep in; there’s not much point in saying it doesn’t.” he said.
“But I wouldn’t say it’s complacency as much as expectation that you have to do certain things and you have to look a certain way to produce a certain result but if you just keep to the basics you don’t have to do anything special.
“You just have to work hard and do the simple things, move the ball on quickly, move it on the chest, bounce the ball in front and use your feet at the right time.
“But sometimes after a good win you try to do something fancy and we tried to do a lot of that and we got caught and it cost us dearly.”
McGeeney gave a frank assessment of Armagh’s display after the game at O’Moore Park. The Laois win and victories for Clare, Fermanagh and Cavan mean only two points separate the eight Division Two teams at this stage.
“I’m sure they know (where they went wrong),” he said.
“But my job is to coach and try to point out things they can critique. Their job is to try and learn and move on from it.
“We were the architects of our own downfall for most of it.
“The ref was giving soft frees to both sides. Anybody who was going down, he was buying it and they were scoring them and we were giving them to them soft.
“It was annoying because I thought we started (the second half) well but the cutting edge (wasn’t there) when we were getting back into it.
“I thought we had three easy chances but we took the wrong option on all three of them and we gave them the chance to down the field and they got three frees in-a-row.”
