Football

Kicking Out: Sport's beauty feels like a con

Armagh's round four qualifier with Roscommon was a rare day when the quality of the game held its own with little sense of occasion to prop it up. The pandemic has stripped sport bare and the results have not been pretty. Picture by Philip Walsh
Armagh's round four qualifier with Roscommon was a rare day when the quality of the game held its own with little sense of occasion to prop it up. The pandemic has stripped sport bare and the results have not been pretty. Picture by Philip Walsh Armagh's round four qualifier with Roscommon was a rare day when the quality of the game held its own with little sense of occasion to prop it up. The pandemic has stripped sport bare and the results have not been pretty. Picture by Philip Walsh

IF you were asked right now to name the best game you’d seen in any sport in the last five years, what would you choose?

For me, it’s one that would be so far down most people’s lists that it’s unlikely to ever get a mention.

But on that 2017 summer Saturday afternoon in Portlaoise, the sun shone and the wind was off busying itself elsewhere.

The pitch was as dry as a bone. The ball jumped off it and stuck to the hands. The flags never moved a muscle the whole day.

An All-Ireland round four football qualifier between Armagh and Roscommon may not jump to your memory, but it does to mine.

For 70 minutes, particularly the first half, the two teams showcased absolutely everything that was best about Gaelic football.

It was a true exhibition of furiously uninhibited, breathless attacking football.

By half-time the score was 1-11 to 0-12. It finished 2-22 to 1-19.

The weather, the crowd, the colour, the style, two teams playing a high-wire act with perfect balance – this was a showcase of all that is good.

Round four qualifiers don’t get to be classics though, no matter how good they are.

Look at so many of the big sporting draws for fans in the last five years.

Mayo-Dublin. Liverpool-Barcelona. Shane Lowry’s Saturday back nine at the Open. Dublin-Kerry. Patriots-Falcons. Limerick-Galway.

These were sporting occasions that drove the senses wild. That’s a bit the game itself, and a lot of everything around it.

History, nostalgia, expectation, drama, timing, a true classic is a mix of it all.

The reason nobody remembers Armagh-Roscommon is because nothing really was riding on it, and nobody really watched it.

Yet that is how the majority of games are. You only get a handful of big games a year in any sport. The rest need the quality of the game to carry them when the occasion cannot be manufactured.

The anticipation of what might be is a more enduring thrill than what is. No matter how many times it lets us down, we always think the next game will be better.

So we continue to sit on, wanting to be lied to because it’s better than the alternative.

Part of the allure of greatness is its rarity. If every game is memorable, then no game is memorable.

The pandemic has stripped sport bare. The removal of fans has left us with no choice but to examine the games for what they are, rather than what we perceive they could be.

Over the last few months, it has become so utterly apparent to what extent sport has long been spinning us a web of deceit.

A fortnight ago, I watched the second half of Crystal Palace v Manchester United.

Without fear of contradiction, it was the worst sporting event of the last 1,000 years.

This Six Nations has been hard looked at. Ireland and Scotland was a tough slog on Sunday afternoon.

Yet imagine how different that game would have felt in a packed Murrayfield. How the ending might even have been rewritten had the crowd’s euphoria pushed Scotland to victory once they got it to 24-24.

It’s no different in that sense from soccer, golf, athletics, tennis, or any other sport on the planet.

And the truth is that Gaelic football isn’t all that much to look at a lot of the time now.

We’ve an awful habit of getting in a twist over rule changes in the GAA.

Look at how badly hurling needed the black card, yet how it resisted for so long.

It’s often said that the players have no voice. That they are the ones affected, so they should get to set the agenda.

That’s a mad idea. No sport should let players set the rules. Honour among thieves and all that.

Contrary to popular opinion, the current players are not the most important people in the game.

It’s the next generation that really matter.

There is no worse sound that the whistling silence that falls across a packed Clones when one team has 15 men back and the other handpasses the ball back and across the field in front of them.

How great is the youth’s interest in watching dour tactical battles that have become the norm in sports the world over?

Youth participation has grown massively in many arenas. But so too have dropout levels.

We can blame the digital age all we want, but are sports generally too concerned with money and standards of sport science to be bothered thinking of the future?

Boring games are a result of mindset and culture, both of which change only when they’re made to.

If you go and watch the quality of recent Bundesliga game between Bayern Munich and Dortmund, or the Champions League tie between PSG and Barcelona, you quickly realise that we’ve all been taken for a ride by the Premier League.

It’s the same sport played with a different mindset.

Stripping the occasion away has left English soccer with nothing. The games themselves are not good enough to keep us fooled.

Rugby is an atrocious sport to watch without fans. The enormous physical growth of players over the last generation means that 30 players on the pitch is just too many.

There is very little space for invention.

Gaelic football is very similar. On its good days, it is enthralling. Most days, though, it is a slog.

Imagine how both sports would be altered for the better if they were 13-a-side.

Players are better prepared, fitter, faster and able to cover more ground. The majority of team sports are now based on counter-attacking.

Only the hopelessly devoted enjoy that.

More than ever, flair needs space to express itself on the sporting field.

There’s a balance between maintaining the principles that made the current generation fall in love and play, and staying attractive and relevant to the next group behind.

Not every game will shimmer. We don’t want them to, because then nothing stands out.

We must, however, be conscious of how a sport looks to the youth of today, for they are the players of tomorrow.

Sport has kept us sane but with stripped back to its rawest form, its beauty has felt like a con. We’ve seen the flaws now, and we might never be able to look at it the same way again.

Convincing the next generation of its qualities has arguably been made harder by the saturated, wall-to-wall coverage in the last few months.

It can’t all be brilliant, but we can’t have as much dross as we’re being served either.

Gaelic football is among the sports that needs to look at itself in the mirror.