Paul Rouse: Introducing The Madness of Football, a special Irish Examiner podcast about the evolution of our game

What we are trying to do is to look at how Gaelic football has evolved over the decades, particularly across the 70 years since GAA matches were first shown in full on TV in the 1960s.

What we are hoping to do it is:

1. Show the way football was played at a particular time;

2. Show the way football has changed;

3. Try and explain how and who changed it;

4. Destroy mythology.

As well as telling stories, we want to try and come at the evolution of Gaelic football from a different angle. For each of the matches, Maurice Brosnan has used a modern statistical approach to examine the key features of old games, James Horan broke down the tactical approach of the teams, and myself and Tony Leen chipped in along the way.

it is difficult to think of any field game that is as derided as Gaelic football. The game is presented as being perpetually in crisis, decline, disarray or just simply diseased.

The sense of doom was perfectly captured in a question asked in the Irish Independent 100 years ago: “Is it true, after all, that Gaelic Football is dying?” 

This summer again – in the middle of a dismal 2023 All-Ireland football championship – there was renewed speculation in print that Gaelic football was doomed, that the “apocalypse” had begun, and ultimately that the “the complete and final destruction” of the game was at hand.

The truth is that even people who are besotted with Gaelic football, have despaired at it; there are times when it is an impossible love.

But, for all the criticism, Gaelic football is still incredibly popular.

The most basic reason for this lies in the pleasure of kicking a ball. This love of the ball is most easily understood when one is placed in front of a small child, or in the noise of a GAA nursery, where it is the ball that matters more than anything else.

Basically it is one of the most natural things in the world to swing a boot at a round ball and watch it roll. This is something that stays with people, long after they have stopped kicking a ball. Seamus Heaney once wrote:

“Those were the days – Booting a leather football Truer and farther Than you ever expected!

"It went rattling Hard and Fast Over daisies and benweeds, It thumped But it sang too” 

The pleasure of playing with a ball is shared by societies across the world in a history that extends for millennia back past the modern organisation of sport.

For example, 2000 years ago the Chinese played a hugely popular game called ‘cuju’ (literally, kick-ball), medieval Japan had a football game called ‘kemari’, and for thousands of years the Aboriginal Australians played a football game called ‘Marn Gook’.

Contested ball games (including football ones) are central parts of cultures in societies across the world, time out of mind. In the archaeology of Mesoamerica – that of the Aztecs and the Mayans, for example – the remains of more than 1,500 ball courts survive, despite the destruction of that culture following the fall of the Aztecs to the superior firepower (and weaponised diseases) of Spanish conquistadores in the early 1500s.

Many more courts must have been lost to the jungle or destroyed by the Spanish, but this was a form of play which developed across 3,000 years, where players played games in opposition to each other.

This is a story of a love of competitive play which is retold in Greek and Roman civilisation, and in European societies ever since.

The ‘folk football’ games played across Ireland through medieval and early modern history fit easily into this wider history.

This love of playing football that pre-dates 1884 was continued through the Gaelic football that was codified by the GAA. It finds easy expression in one of Brendan Kennelly’s poems when he proclaimed: “I’m shot through with the madness of football”.

This madness is, of course, not just about the skills of the game as revealed in the joy of kicking a ball, but also the game as contest. The physical contest between two opposing players and the broader contest between two opposing teams is what turns playing with a football into a game of football.

And this is essential to its attraction. Kennelly put it brilliantly when he wrote of attending an All-Ireland senior football final in the middle of September, as one of a crowd of almost 90,000 people. The band played with verve, the national anthem was sung with passion, electricity ran through the crowd in anticipation of the match about to start, a feeling that turned a stranger into a brother:

“It was, dare I say it, a religious occasion.

"The ball was thrown in and those two great teams Proceeded to kick the shit out of each other.” 

The thing is though that while the almost universal love of playing with a ball, and of engaging in a contest for that ball and for victory in a match, are essential to the enduring popularity of Gaelic football, it obviously does not properly explain why it is the form of football chosen by so many people above other football games.

There is now no shortage of opportunity for anyone who wishes to choose soccer (promoted as ‘the beautiful game’ by its propagandists) and rugby (the ultimate marketeer's dream in its professional age).

The idea that Gaelic football was essentially doomed to defeat by these competitors is a familiar one. In The Sunday Times in 1989, the RTÉ broadcaster John Bowman wrote that it was naïve to imagine that soccer, rugby and Gaelic football could all prosper indefinitely on such a small island: “Many astute observers reckon that the threat must be to Gaelic football.” 

In ‘The Irish Times’, Michael Finlan made a similar point at the same time: “We do seem to have reached the stage where soccer, a once-reviled symbol of foreign yokes and repression, is threatening to become the national game in Ireland.” 

But still Gaelic football rides out the inevitable ups and downs, and its hold remains formidable.

Why is this?

Could it actually be admitted that it is a game that has been for so long a great one to play?

This is something that runs through the generations. It can be found in recent comments by the English soccer player, Jack Grealish: “I wasn't really into other sports growing up but I loved Gaelic.” 

And, crucially, this enjoyment of playing was set within a successful frame: Between the 1880s and the 1920s, Gaelic football established itself in almost every parish in the country – and certainly in those parishes where hurling was not dominant.

In those decades a basic infrastructure of club formation and inter-club rivalry was established. More than that, the framework for the progress of these clubs and for competition between them was developed. And more than that again, the fact that the games were given additional meaning by tying them to boundaries of territory was crucial.

Basically, a game was not just made into a sport, but it was given additional meaning by making it stand for something more than just play.

From this meaning, a history has followed in which local loyalties are given free rein through the football teams that represent club and county.

It is true, of course, that hurling can do the same thing. But the difficulties in spreading hurling – rooted in the technical nature of the game and, historically, in the additional cost in playing it – hampered its expansion for many decades. It is arguable that they continue to do so.

In the meantime, we are left with a love of the madness of Gaelic football.

*Paul Rouse is professor of history at University College Dublin.

Episode 1 (Monday) and 2 (Wednesday) will be available next week with one episode per week on Wednesdays thereafter.