Rule changes are not the answer to football conundrum

THIS is the time of year when we should be enjoying the provincial club championships but with all the negative feedback surrounding the state of football, this columnist is finding it hard to.

Football is being viewed and reported through such a negative lense, we are almost predisposed to feeling that it is going to be a terrible watch and not worthy of the time.

It’s like the game has been infected by the second coming of the Black Death and unless drastic measures are taken it is going to die a slow and painful death.

Maybe it’s time we start putting some balance on how we view the game, because the reality is it’s not anywhere near as terrible as what is blowing in the wind.

Furthermore, the negative-outlook that is surrounding the game right now has added rocket fuel to the theory that rule changes should be made to try and combat the current trends across certain levels of the sport.

Rule changes are completely throwing the baby out with the bathwater and bypasses the root of where the problems actually lie. And they aren’t simple.

This columnist hates rules changes because history has shown that they don’t work for their intended purposes in football.

I will also add, right now, that I view rule changes through a certain sense of bias because I’m still playing the game and don’t like the idea of it being toyed with by a group of suits sitting around a table, armed with a romantic view of how it should be played.

The recent Mayo Senior Final between Ballina and Breaffy appears to have been the straw that broke the camels back for a lot of folk.

There hasn’t been as much disgust for football since Sean Cavanagh’s pull-down of Conor McManus or Meath’s daylight-robbery of a Leinster title against Louth.

But that one game didn’t reflect the whole Mayo championship. Admittedly, the championship as a whole wasn’t as free-scoring as previous years and the style of football is more defence orientated, but it doesn’t need open heart surgery.

Plus, why would we bring in rule changes for a product that doesn’t need them? The Intermediate championship in Mayo was excellent; why should that suffer?

If you look back through history, the game of football experiences trends in terms of how it is played. The trends come and go as trends do, but the basic principles of the game remain the same, and always have done.

Rule changes are a quick fix, a cure as opposed to a prevention; it might give temporary relief and respite but the knock-on effects will have serious consequences when they catch up on you, and they will.

As a senior club footballer, the game as a spectacle means absolutely nothing to me. We aren’t concerned about how we look in getting the job done, but only about getting it done.

That doesn’t mean you play with an aggressive abandonment of all rules and regulations like the Crazy Gang, more that play within the rules as best you can.

The game of football is about being solid defensively, first and foremost. And right now, there is no other proven system out there that ensures you can remain competitive in a match than this style.

The hours and effort that is required to play senior club football right now is enough to convince most that remaining competitive and alive for as long as possible, particularly against the bigger clubs, is giving you the return on investment you need to keep going.

Wanting to play open, expansive, and sexy football will get you one thing and it won’t be pretty.

That’s probably the mindset of most club footballers. It might not be the right one, or the one supporters want to hear, but that’s how we think.

There are two other major problems staring us right in the face that no one is talking about.

The first is the calendar.

Club football takes place when the weather turns bad, pitches get wet, conditions worse, and the ability to play free-flowing football becomes very difficult. The weather this year, particularly in Mayo, was dreadful.

Yet, the same people wanting to change the rules are the ones advocating to push the club calendar closer to the winter.

If club football was given some life to breath alongside inter-county in a shortened calendar, during warmer and drier months, then maybe the style of football would change.

Secondly, and this is a culture that has engulfed senior inter-county football more-so, football is now a results-based business because of the money being given to managers and coaching teams.

Croke Park have completely turned a blind-eye to this over the past decade and it is now, frankly, out of control.

Managers and coaches can effectively charge what they like right now because the chances are there is some club out there willing to pay it. That is fine for the larger clubs with a huge pool of resources, but the smaller clubs are bleeding themselves dry because they feel they have to compete.

Management teams that come in from ‘outside’ are brought there to win. The likelihood is greater that they are using the platform of a senior club to raise their stock and get that step up to inter-county.

So if they can show on their CV that they brought discipline, structure and competitiveness to a team, those criteria are what most others will look for from a top-line perspective and they can go on to bigger and better things.