Ferbane and Tullamore mentors offer up passionate defence of modern footballers

MODERN football has come infor an ever more damning volume of criticism in the past couple of years. The complaints have got louder, more extreme as people hit out at the tactics and the way it is played.

A few years ago, such observations would be only heard on bar counters and Church corners but social media means that everyone has access to a medium to made themselves heard – some weekends, you can't look at Facebook without someone having a cut at football.

They probably don't realise it but by extension they are also criticising every young player playing gaelic football now, telling them they are playing rubbish and are not good enough.

It is all going a bit far and if you look, you can still find so much to admire and enjoy in football. It may be over defensive at times, there are games that are painful to watch but you also have to be very good to play a possession brand of football. You have to be very fit, you have to be able to think on their feet, you have to be able to move at pace. There are spectacular scores, great attacking football when teams race forward and while the game has obvious flaws, it is nowhere near as bad as some are painting.

The level of venom out there is also very unfair to young men who prepare hard, are clearly enjoying their football and putting in a level of commitment that many of their predecessors didn't.

It is the nature of people to romanticise their own era at the expense of the modern one. I remember having a conversation with two of Tullamore's staunchest gaels in the 1990s about when football was best and they argued vehemently that it was at its peak in the 1950s and '60s. They were absolutely sincere in what they were saying and spoke about that football with great passion but some of these games can now be accessed on YouTube and people can see for themselves!

Like life in general, the game changes and evolves over time; old tactics, methods and preparation go out of date and clocks never turn back. People need to search deeper for the enjoyment, get off the bandwagons and two central figures in Sunday's Senior Football Championship final offered up a stirring defence of the modern footballer last week.

Ferbane selector Brian Keenaghan and Tullamore coach Cathal Daly were very much singing off the same hymn sheet when they were asked about the game and the criticism it encounters last week.

Keenaghan declared:

“I think there's times you get it hard to watch games yourself, and that's fair enough, but I think players now, they're nothing like 20 years ago. Players now, think about the game a lot more, they study the game a lot more, they understand how they want to play and how they're trying to play. And the fitness levels these boys have reached to play that game – we all lament 30 years ago when everything was great and yet you look back on scorelines and you see 1-4 to 0-2 and 0-6 to 0-4 and things like that and you say, it wasn't that great, was it? As you say, when you see likes of Cathal Flynn and Cormac Egan and Jack Bryant, when they do get to open up, the skilful footballers still stand out.

“At times it can be hard to watch, at times it can be ultra defensive but it's your job to try and work a way around that defence and if you can get through that defence, then the other team might have to open up. But I think players get a hard knock now and I don't think that is fair on them. Football has changed. Hurling has changed, hurling now is nothing like it used to be. Football has changed, soccer has changed, rugby has changed, every sport changes. They'll bring in the new rules and see will it make football more exciting. Sometimes I wonder, I think back to the semi-final against Rhode last year, and I don't think anyone was coming out of O'Connor Park saying I'm never going to see a football match again because it was a fabulous game of football. And the following day, Tullamore and Edenderry was a good game of football with bad weather. So I'd have to agree that lads get a very hard knock. The game has changed, move with it, don't be harking back to 50 years ago.”

Ferbane's great 5 in a row team from 1986 to 1990 played simple, direct long ball, getting it in as quickly as possible to deadly forwards Pat Doyle and Brendan Lowry. Keenaghan reminisced fondly:

“And they were great footballers, I remember going into Tullamore and watching Brendan Lowry playing corner forward for Offaly against Sligo when I was about 12 and the corner back had him in his pocket the whole game, the whole game. And I think it was a 60-minute league game at the time, and after 55 minutes Brendie hadn't felt the weight of the ball and he scored 2-2 in the last five minutes and Brendie Lowry was the greatest footballer in Ireland. He hadn't felt the weight of the ball for 55 minutes. So we romanticise everything and we say it was better in our day, it was better in the day before that and people that were watching us play football were saying it was better in their day and so on. But times changes, the levels of fitness now are phenomenal, you wouldn't get away with just hoofing the ball out the field because you'd be just turned over straight away. I think we romanticise it too much, you go back and look at some of those games, TG4 used to have GAA Gold, and some of those games, you'd wonder.”

He talked about people romanticising the past and their own era.

“Horrific. We'll tell you that the '90s and the '80s was football at its best. Offaly in the '90s in the hurling, and they were brilliant games, they were absolutely fantastic, but they wouldn't last five minutes now. The hurlers would, because they were able to hurl, but if you played the hurling that Offaly played in 1998, 1994, you wouldn't get to half-time, you genuinely wouldn't.

“We romanticise all this but I just think the game is different and I think part of the attraction with it is probably trying to break down the other team now. It's probably sitting down and saying how are Tullamore going to play, how are Rhode going to play, how are Shamrocks going to play and we'd say we'll get our match ups right, this is the game we'll play, if that doesn't work we'll switch to this, if that doesn't work we'll switch to this. 30 years ago if you told a lad there was a plan A, B and C he'd be gone out of the dressing room. It was if plan A didn't work, keep trying it. It has changed and players are so much more intelligent.”

Tullamore coach Cathal Daly talked about some of the changes he has seen since his footballing heyday in the 1990s.

“It's definitely changed. There was so many times I'd look around and there could be four of us in the whole half of the field and everyone else was gone attacking. The amount of space that was afforded to forwards back then was... you're trusted to mark that man and you go and do that, that's your job and then, like you said, you kick the ball away and now, possession is king, you hold possession and you use it right. If it's on go for it, if it's not on use it appropriately or not give it away or not waste it.”

He is used to listening critics of modern football and defended players.

“Everyone is entitled to their opinion and if they don't like it, that's fair enough but if you're here week in week out, day in, day out looking at these boys training, how they're going after it, how they mind their bodies, how they're coming prepared for training, let that be weights, diet, recovery, mobility, all that stuff they're doing. And an awful lot of that is well away from any football field. So the dedication that they show before they ever step into a field is huge. So to disrespect them in that way is unfortunate. I don't like it myself either and I'm sure back in the day when I was playing people were giving out that we weren't playing the way they were playing in the '80s and the '70s.

“Though I think it's one of those where are we always looking backwards with rose tinted glasses and what we're in at the minute we're never happy with it. I don't know, but you know what, at the end of the day too, you'd love people to be happy and you'd love people to be excited about it but it is what it is and we're here to try and win a game or a championship. It's a championship now that's on the line in the last game of the season within Offaly. That's disappointing but there's not much we can do about it and I don't think Ferbane or whoever else is left in their championships at any level really take any cognisance of what other people think. We're just trying to do our own jobs right now.”

Daly also agreed that people glorify the past.

“Yeah, like the skills that these guys have now would buy and sell anything I ever done. The further you go back the less time was spent on the game, the amount of time the lads are spending on the game now and not to give them credit for that, that's hard. It's hard on them.”