Less than a week to Christmas and, if anything, Jim Gavin’s Football Review Committee is cranking things up a notch, rather than winding down.
A webinar staged to brief any interested coaches on the new blueprint for Gaelic football and the key rule enhancements that will be trialled for 2025 had roughly 1,500 on it the other evening. Another, aimed at club referees, saw 800 log on.
On Friday, an hour-long media briefing took place to put more shape on what is to come in January as counties gear up for the start of the Allianz Football League and a game of Gaelic football that will look like no other.
Seven key rule enhancements include some potential game-changers. There’s the two-point 40-metre scoring arc, beyond which kick-outs will have to go.
There’s a new restriction on the goalkeeper taking a pass inside his own half that is intended to cut out so many of the dull passages of keep-ball that have made so many games a hard watch, and which prompted GAA president Jarlath Burns to approach Jim Gavin to lead this FRC. There’s also a three-up/three-back rule where teams must have at least three outfield players on each side of the halfway line.
One of the most interesting elements to emerge yesterday was how central a new Game Intelligence Unit will be to monitoring it all and making changes if necessary.
And Gavin confirmed that means making changes in-competition, during the Allianz Football League. Or even mid-Championship, if it comes to that, though he was at pains to point out the chances of that happening were remote.
But the safety net for all stakeholders – from players, managers and coaches to referees – is that ‘everything is up for review’ in this trial year that is 2025 before a vote will be taken on whether to make any or all of them permanent.
In that respect, this new Game Intelligence Unit will be key. Made up of ‘academic institutes’, the FRC is hoping it gets the buy-in from the participating counties so that it can collate GPS data as well as monitor tactical trends.
‘We as a committee are working to set those thresholds that we need to measure,’ revealed Gavin.
‘A lot of it is high speed running, max speed running, total distance. Stuff that any of the athletic development coaches will be measuring anyway. Then, hand passing, kick passing; the plan is to have most of the games covered as well with it.’
But only in a general sense rather than revealing individual counties, as Gavin stressed. ‘So we’ll have that data from the games but the physical data, you’ll be anonymised. You won’t know who it is. You’ll only know it’s a Division 1 team or a Division 2 team.
‘We will have a data controller that will collate the information. We’ll all be signing NDRs [Non-Disclosure Requests] around this. It’s not our data. We need to anonymise it for the purposes of research, which would be standard enough.
‘For this to work, we don’t need to name what team it is that is being benchmarked. For obvious reasons, the teams won’t want that.’
That information will be compared with previous seasons to give a full picture of how the game is changing.
Then it will be up to the FRC to review that data and see whether to recommend any amendments or alterations.
‘There will be a data controller in the Game Intelligence Unit. I won’t have a clue who it is.
‘I’ll just know [for example] in Division 1 if there’s more distance covered, if there’s less, if there is more high-speed running, more stoppages – whatever.’
And Gavin added: ‘Everything is up for review – everything. I mean, that’s our job, that’s the commitment we have.’
Any potential changes then would have to be agreed by the GAA’s Central Council.
‘It just gives the Ard Chomhairle great flexibility. At the same time, they need to balance out the changes in competition.
So you can imagine say, for example, that a significant amendment was made to a rule after the second round.
‘Teams might rightly say, “Well we played the first two rounds with that rule, that cost us two points in a game.” So that would have to be balanced up by Ard Chomhairle if we were ever going to do that.
‘I don’t think anybody’s going to stand on ceremony if something clearly isn’t working.
‘I think the most logical place to make any adjustments or amendments or rescinding of the rules is the break in the National League.
‘That’s the original concept of it, that’s where it came from. When you look back to our very first presentation we gave, we did say there was a gap, a kind of a release valve, between the National League and Championship to make any modifications.’
For supporters, there will be an interactive element to the whole process. A QR code on programmes will lead straight to a short survey about the new-look game. That allows the FRC to get live rolling feedback during the league as well.
On the decision by the Higher Education committee not to incorporate the new rules into the upcoming Sigerson and Trench Cups, Gavin described it a ‘very sensible decision’ given the short lead-in.
‘The point about players having to switch over and back [between rules], I don’t think that’s too much of a drama, to be honest.’
Arguably, the major stress test will come at club level and, significantly, the recommendation is for counties to adopt all the new rules at underage level as well.
However, the focus naturally will be on inter-county and how it all looks when it reaches a national audience.
In that respect, the countdown is well and truly on to the first round of Allianz Football League action on the last weekend in January.
