IN his inaugural address as president of the United States, John F Kennedy said: “Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate.”
He talked about instruments of war and peace, the United Nations – “our last best hope” – and quests for peace with nations who would “make themselves our adversary”.
Words as pertinent in 2025 as in 1961.
That autumn, gatesmen at Croke Park allowed 90,556 people in to see the All-Ireland football final between Down and Offaly. They could let in no more.
Many thousands of others were left standing in the surrounding streets listening to the commentary being relayed over the ground’s speakers.
The game was described as dour, hard-fought, failing to live up to expectation.
Across the ‘60s that Down team would cause consternation in Kerry for breaking the ball off their vaunted fielders and scavenging around in the muck for the breaks.
Does anything ever really change?
The Football Review Committee has recommended alterations to its new rules that will be passed by Central Council on Monday.
Thereafter, Gaelic football will work on its summer body.
The FRC has negotiated a settlement on the 12v11 issue.It is a halfway house negotiated out of fear of the backlash from goalkeepers if they were banned from joining the attack.
Possessions for goalkeepers were up for week five, as they had been for week four and week three.
Also up were the percentages of those possessions received inside the opposition 45’ (24% from 17%) and the number of shots taken by goalkeepers (1.9 per game from 1.1).
Under the FRC’s alteration, if fly goalies still want to attack, they can. But they’ll do it knowing that the minute they cross halfway, they’ll be marked now as if they are an outfield player.
The number of inter-county goalkeepers who would be more comfortable carrying the ball into contact than the outfield player who has to stay back in their place is minimal.
In a roundabout way, the FRC is sending the fly goalie to death row.
It’s almost Trumpian in its strong-armed subversiveness. ‘The law doesn’t say they’re banned, we’re not banning anyone, some of our best friends are fly goalies.’ But in effect, it relegates the tactic’s usefulness.
Nobody can really complain. It’s a fair compromise.
There’s no restriction and there’s no advantage. If you want to go, go, but you’re into the lion’s den now.
You can crimp about an advantage being taken away from teams had good attacking goalkeepers but it lines everyone up, one-v-one.
If you’re into the statistical side of things, you could wonder what’s really changed?
The ball is in play slightly less than it was.
Handpasses and kick-passes are both down, but the ratio of one to the other has increased in favour of hand-passing.
Shots are up but the number of scores is around the same.
But numbers can be deceiving.
For instance, the kick-passes we’re losing are the ones across a defence from a man under no pressure to a different man under no pressure. They’re no great loss.
Turnovers are up pretty significantly and there has been plenty of evidence that, imbued by the potential rewards, well-organised teams are starting to press much higher up the pitch.
You can see that they’re actively coaching their setup to do so, laying traps on kickouts, tempting goalkeepers to go short and then stepping up as a group.
Periods of lateral play will happen but they are much shorter and much less than frequent this year than they were.
There will be bad games this summer. Teams taking a pummelling will have difficulty getting their hands up to protect themselves in the face of the onslaught.
The provincial championships will bring inevitable beatings that will lead to an inevitable cry that the rules are to blame for this because teams can’t shut up shop.
But in the last two years alone, there have been 12 championship games where there were 15 points or more in it at the end. Eight of them, the margin was over 20.
Hammerings may be heightened by the changes but they won’t have been caused by them.
There have been serious imperfections with the FRC’s process over the last few months, particularly around communication.
They’ve made a couple of unnecessary moves like the 20-second timer on kickouts that have given a rod to those that couldn’t wait to use it.
It probably was the GAA’s job to communicate changes but the GAA have never been good at that.
The insistence on doing things a certain way almost undermined these amendments.
Jim Gavin clearly didn’t want to divulge information on Morning Ireland on Tuesday but it would have been patently unfair on counties not to have been informed of changes as soon as possible.
It shouldn’t have taken from Monday until Thursday night for information to be disseminated. Those processes need looked at and modernised in the fast food era of information overload.
But the changes had to be made in conjunction with each other. We’ve tried the independent route for 15 years, pulling at this thread and that. Putting a rule in, teams finding a way around it after a fortnight and then that’s it, we tried, you’re stuck with it for five years.
The FRC’s growing unpopularity is a sign that they have negotiated the first three months of the year in a way designed to appease supporters rather than coaches.
Do not judge Gaelic football on the period of early April to late May.
What it looks like from early June until late July is what is important.