Your problem with Gaelic football is not the hand pass.
Your problem is with teams playing 14 men behind the ball.
Your other problem is the keep-ball tactics, when players run the clock down by slowly giving the size five a tour of the most unexciting, risk-adverse areas of the pitch.
But the hand pass is just a symptom of the actual illnesses. Just because you get a pain behind the eyes when you have a migraine, it doesn’t mean you have to gouge them out.
The symptom of cautious tactics in football though can be unsightly and boring and it’s that symptom – the hand pass – that gets targeted for relief.
So, there’s a school of thought that preaches the GAA must introduce a new rule:
Restrict the number of consecutive hand passes to a maximum of four. After that, the player must kick the ball.
The idea is that it would speed up the game. We’ve all played the no-touch possession matches in training – they’re fast and exciting and the ball and players alike have to constantly move. It would be easily introduced and wouldn’t exactly be reinventing the wheel.
https://twitter.com/Woolberto/status/1026124319582314496
But how would stopping teams being able to hand pass for a fifth time really contribute anything towards solving the actual problem you have? The problems, remember, are blanket defences and keep-ball.
Blanket defence
If anything, limiting the hand pass would make the blanket defence even more effective than it ever was.
Teams hand pass because it would be fucking stupid to kick the ball down the throat of 14 men. They have to be patient. They have to wait for an opening. And they know the other team wants to turn them over and hit them on the break.
If you’re forcing them to kick it after four hand passes you’re handing blanket defences the initiative because you’re stopping the like of Dublin from playing the best and most effective way to play against a blanket defence. You’re telling them they can no longer do what they have to do to beat that one-dimensional tactic.
Keep-ball
You’re also kidding yourself if you think it would suddenly stop the keep-ball play.
Ciaran Kilkenny retains possession with his 40 yard sprints into space and he winds up a hand pass for about three seconds under no pressure whatsoever. A Gaelic football pitch is absolutely huge and even bigger when the opposition are all behind the ball. There is loads and loads and loads of room to kick the ball to an unmarked player and please do not forget that keep-ball passages of play only unfold when one team is set up defensively anyway – so it’s easy to do because you generally have at least seven unmarked players.
And the idea that limiting the hand pass will suddenly encourage defensive teams to come out of their shell on the off-chance they might get a turnover is cuckoo stuff. They could try get a turnover anyway in today’s game by pushing up on men like Dublin do but they decide that they’d rather defend in numbers in the danger area. Why would that philosophy change? Especially when teams can keep the ball away from them in the wide open pitch anyway. Especially when they’ve a cautious manager who innately doesn’t want to try win the ball up the pitch. And especially – especially – if they’re now being given a bigger advantage by being told teams can no longer freely hand pass around them until they tire.
Your shell in front of goals would never have been more solid. Ever.
I get it, tallies of unadventurous hand passing can be frustrating as hell to watch but they’re only happening because teams have 14 men behind the ball. This proposed rule does nothing to solve that problem unfortunately, and it tampers with the fundamental rules of the game with no thought to real-life, real-time scenarios.
Some of the slickest goals have seen sides sliced open with a succession of hand-passing. Imagine you’ve already accumulated your four and you have a player through one-on-one if you could just hand pass it over the last defender’s head. It’s also just a necessity for players to get out of trouble or to move the ball on quicker rather than solo it up yourself.
Granted, those fundamentals might be abused now but you have to ask why are they being abused? And you have to really question if changing the hand pass is going to change the actual problem.
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