Colin Sheridan: Expect Ulster to crack Gaelic football's new puzzle before the rest

Who to blame? Well, that’s easy. In Ulster football, we’ve long had a cartoon villain. Like Lee Van Cleef in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, their face never did fit. It didn’t matter that they were the great innovators, the ones with the actual stones to come up with something new. What mattered to those so quick to vilify them was that they had the audacity to challenge the old order. Worse, that they had so little respect for the order in the first place.

With the advent of the FRC, the Enlightenment Age has arrived and the plague of defence minded, short passing teams is over - or so we’re told. The demands on players, referees and coaches - already enormous - will only increase as familiarity with a new way of playing changes the focus on what type of player is necessary to succeed. Expect the S&C coaches to become prophets of doom, as they manage load and continue their parade of post-game importance by running subs and underperforming players, on-pitch as RTÉ and TG4 conduct their interviews. Players will have to be fitter to play this game: there is already evidence that a ref in a recent trial ran 2 km more in a sixty-minute match; by that metric, what will an actual player have to run?

And what of the old way? A way inspired by logical minded Ulster men, who embraced the ‘puke football’ insult and - inspired by the patronising sneers of the “purists” down south - morphed a new game - all within the rules - and spread the gospel of pragmatism, counter attack and lethal finishers as a way to win.

What they developed, Dublin perfected, imitation being the greatest compliment you can pay someone in sport. Even so, many observers dismissed and despised the Ulster template. By doing so, one ignores the spectacularly innovative Ulsterisation of coaching approaches, which spread plantation-like throughout almost every club and county and led to much soul searching and a yearning for the days of Gaelic Greco-Roman antiquity, where stoicism, man on man combat and long kicking and high fielding were apparently features of every parish. A pandemic of revisionist history gripped the country, one that erroneously labelled everything that came before - (pretty much 1920 to 2000) as a veritable golden age, a nobler time when defenders rarely left their posts and the third man tackle was de rigeur.

In a neat symmetrical bookend to the twelve-year era, this year Ulster teams completed a clean sweep of all major Gaelic football competitions. It is almost a defiant shake of the red hand at the rest of the country: we invented it and now at the end of these rules, we will win everything. Their blueprint, first presented by Donegal in 2012 was mimicked, adapted and fine-tuned to perfection by some teams, most notably Jim Gavin’s Dublin who mixed outrageously talented players with a healthy dose of cynicism and defensive meanness. Kerry, by bringing in Paddy Tally in 2022 and subsequently winning the All-Ireland, acknowledged there might be something to this method of playing. Having a solid defence is valued in most world sports; soccer, basketball, American football to name three, pride themselves on defensive resilience as a platform on which to build success. In no other sporting world is it chastised as much as Gaelic football.

Short tactical passing and restarts infiltrated through to hurling too. Take Limerick as a case in point: Paul Kinnerk, the vaunted coach of their five-in-a-row team, learned his trade as a football coach and transferred the Gaelic football pragmatism of the age onto the hallowed hurling fields of summer. Few noticed the tactical fouling, the sweepers and short passing as exact replicas of the ‘big ball’ approach and not many minded, as John Kiely and Kinnerk delivered unprecedented success.

With the universal acceptance of the FRC’s new proposals to save the ancient game for eternal damnation and fire, Jim Gavin has become the Voltaire of the day, espousing greater freedom for forwards to express their skills and point taking ability. While building in a chance to review all new proposals after the National Football League was a smart move, the momentum is clearly behind change. So change we shall have.

What will be fascinating to watch is which counties adapt quickest, and for that we may be looking north once again. Inherent in their GAA culture is codebreaking, and a complete ambivalence to the po-faced hand-wringing of traditionalists appalled by change. Ulster football could care less. If these rules were designed to save football from suffocation, expect them to figure it out before anybody else.

The new Bolt

Gout Gout. A name you may never have read or heard of before today, but one - barring disaster - that will loom large in the sporting consciousness for the next decade at least. 

Gout is an Australian teenage sprinting sensation who recorded the fourth-fastest under-18 100m time in history on Friday, clocking 10.04 seconds at the All-Schools Athletics Championships in Queensland. The run, which came in the heats but was wind-assisted and therefore does not count in official records, was also the fourth-fastest ever by an Australian sprinter of any age. 

A day later, he ran 200m in 20.04 seconds during the same championships, breaking the national record set by Peter Norman when he won silver at the 1968 Olympics. Gout's time is the fastest ever by a 16-year-old and the second fastest by an athlete under the age of 18 - behind Erriyon Knighton's 19.84 as a 17-year-old in 2021. 

The son of migrants from South Sudan, the teenager turns 17 later this month, and at six feet two inches tall, has earned justifiable comparisons to the greatest sprinter of all time, Usain Bolt. With the 2032 summer Olympics happening in Brisbane, this is a script that already writes itself. 

The hype will be immense, and with Los Angeles falling when he is still just 20 - young enough to fail and learn - we could be looking at the next generational talent in athletics, one whose prodigious rise will hopefully quiet the suspicions that often accompany other sprinters whose talent was not so obvious, but whose rise was far too good to be true.

Less is more rarely given GAA consideration

News that the next phase of a €74m redevelopment of Fitzgerald Stadium in Killarney will commence in the second half of 2025 will be widely welcomed in GAA circles. An iconic ground getting a makeover can only be good news, right? Well, maybe. 

What we have seen over the last two decades in the GAA is overdone redevelopment of county grounds, often with increased capacities that are unnecessary and rarely justified, the resulting debt cripples county boards, and leads to financial burdens they can ill afford to carry. 

Surely it’s time that a review of county grounds is initiated to review those than can be increased in size in a cost efficient way, rather than pimped out at a huge cost, only to be full once a year? It’s hardly rocket science, but we seem impervious to the notion that less is actually often more.

Mediocre Man Utd

Is Ruben Amorim just a better dressed Erik ten Hag? Or is he the genius architect Manchester United fans were sold by a hyperbolic media, keen to see United return to some old version of themselves? What a neat narrative it would be: as City fall, United rise again. 

There are already a few wrinkles in the plan, not least United’s unimpressive start under the Portuguese manager - five games with just two victories, only one of which has come in the Premier league. Factor in, too, a meddling co-owner in bored billionaire Jim Ratcliffe who seems intent on turning the once great club into a version of Abramovich’s Chelsea, just without the trophies. 

Things move fast in football. Another six weeks of mediocre performance and an underwhelming transfer window, and we could be hearing talk of Ole getting behind the wheel again.