Eimear Ryan: There is no right way to take a free... or a penalty
Taking With Deadly Placed Jason Ball Is Pic: Usually The Forde Mccarthy/sportsfile Stephen Aim: Tipp's
Sometimes there is nothing like the pressure of a crowd. Not even one that is baying for your blood – sometimes, it’s the supportive crowd that weighs the heaviest. The one that wants nothing more for you than to slot away that penalty. Not even for their sake, sometimes – for your own sake. Such a crowd can get behind you but it can also get on top of you, the way emotions in Irish are said to be ‘on’ a person, like a mantel or a cloak.
I’m thinking of Evan Ferguson here, a teenager somehow holding his own at the highest level of professional and international soccer. Last Saturday, the crowd at the Aviva and even the crowds in every pub and living-room in the country wanted nothing more than for him to score that spot-kick and end his goalless streak. We wanted him to succeed as much as we wanted Ireland to go one up. Conditions weren’t great and yes, Ferguson did seem to slip a bit as he was kicking the ball, but I was worried about him even before the whistle sounded.
He stood over the penalty for more than 30 seconds as the ref sorted the other players out. Cameras trained on him, his own eyes resting on the ball. That’s too long to wait. The sort of advice I got at club camogie level was not to stand over a free or a set piece too long: if there’s some delay, if a player has gone down, then walk away. Pick the ball up. Replace it on the ground. Stay light on your feet, stay limber. Do not, under any circumstances, stare into the abyss that is the ball while waiting for the whistle, because sometimes...the abyss that is the ball stares back.
This might all sound a bit silly and superstitious, but free-takers are superstitious people as well as creatures of habit. The routine that we are encouraged to develop around set pieces is part psychology, part prayer, part magic spell. Everyone has their preferred stance, their own shimmy, a particular flex of the fingers. The routine is the ritual that sets us up, in theory, for success. It says both ‘I know exactly what I’m doing’ and ‘here goes nothing.’ Like goalkeeping, free-taking is a game of confidence and flow. Hit the first one over, and you’ll be grand.
Tipperary had a torrid time with placed balls in their static league semi-final performance against Clare. Jason Forde, who normally arrows frees over with apparent ease, missed three. Gearoid O’Connor, so steady from long range, was also having an off day. Willie Connors had a crack at them; so did substitute Sean Ryan. No one settled to the task, and Tipp ended up with nearly half of their 20 wides coming from placed balls.
In stark contrast, Clare’s Aidan McCarthy and Mark Rodgers both gave free-taking masterclasses.
Afterwards, Liam Cahill admitted that the matter was still undecided: ‘The narrative coming into today was who will take the frees. We still have plenty of options there, we just struck a day where everybody decided to be off.’ While you can certainly file ‘too many free-takers’ under ‘nice problems to have’, at a certain point you have to choose, empower, and back one of them to the hilt.
As a free-taker, you also have to back yourself. It’s maybe why calmness is the most important attribute of a free-taker; an emotional player can give you amazing return from open play, but over the placed ball what you want is steadiness. Free-taking is an exercise of mentality, focus and consistency, before skill even comes into the equation.
You are trying to hit the ball straight, that is all; even trying to calibrate for the wind can sometimes backfire. Keep it simple, stupid.
I was always a fairly fitful free-taker. As a kid, I loved the responsibility of it, the novelty, and I was young and carefree enough that when I missed one, I was able to shrug it off.
As I became older, the weight of that responsibility sat heavier on my shoulders: I realised that every free won within a certain range had to be sure a thing, or else you were putting your whole team’s chances in jeopardy. Losing confidence in my approach, I began, of all things, to experiment. Having always been a primarily left-sided player, I changed sides and began to hit frees on my right. I had a theory that when you lined up a free, your bas should be pointing towards the goal: hitting off your left was fine for citeogs, but not for right-handed players like me.
This was in the pre-Gillane era, and if I’d seen his left-sided, right-handed approach, maybe I would have stuck to my original guns. There is no ‘right’ way to take frees; or rather, every player comes up with a way that’s right for them.
When lining up a free, I used to say in my mind: Focus, focus, focus. Another prayer, another magic spell. It only sometimes worked. Listening to the excellent Minor Moments podcast recently, I heard Niall Breslin touch on the meaning of this word in sport. Bressie has lived many lives, as a footballer for Westmeath, a rugby player for Leinster, a frontman for the Blizzards, a TV personality, a mental health advocate and, most recently, a sports psychologist.
‘I remember hearing coaches going “Focus on your game” – but what does that mean?’ he said. ‘What does a player hear when they hear the word “focus”? What you need to do is create a mechanism, when they hear that word, they immediately come back to something.’ And that’s the key. Meditation and mindfulness are already at play at the highest levels of sport, and just like yoga, ice baths, and sports psychology before them, their trickle down to the GAA is inevitable.
‘At the highest level of sport there’s literally feck all between players,’ Bressie added. ‘The only thing that comes between the elite and the nearly elite is the mind. Understanding and calming it.’
Maybe never more so than when standing over a placed ball.