PÁDRAIC JOYCE has predicted a mouth-watering season of ‘completely attacking football’ under Gaelic football’s new rules.
Joyce’s Galway beat Kildare 2-18 to 0-17 in a high-scoring challenge game on Saturday evening played under the 2025 rules.
It was an eye-opener for everyone in Newbridge as no-nonsense referee David Gough worked to the letter of the new laws.
Gough brought the ball up to the 20m line four times in the game for handy tap-over frees as punishment for teams breaching the 3/3 rule.
Galway were caught on three occasions in the first half for failing to keep three players in the opposition half.
Gough also applied the new dissent rule and brought the ball up 50 metres on a number of occasions.
The real drama was around the new scoring system, with Galway shooting a whopping six two-pointers from outside the 40m arc, four of those from Footballer of the Year Paul Conroy.
There were more opportunities for kicked passes into pockets of space in the danger area, with teams now unable to drop everyone back to defend.
Joyce said: “It’s nearly gone completely attacking football.
“It’s become a kick-out game and a possession-based game and if you commit turnovers you’re going to be hammered on the far side so it’s huge not to give the ball away cheaply if you can at all, that’s the big thing.
“Look, it’s a kicking game and it’s great to see. The game is called football and if we’re going to go back to that, we won’t complain.
“When you turn the ball over in your own half-back line and win it back, leaving you to counter-attack up the pitch, you have three up top, maybe a three of yours versus four of theirs situation, so you should be getting the ball up there straight away.
“Our approach is kind of to put it back on the players and get their opinions.
“It’s not just what I think, or what the coaches think, the players have to understand as well how they want to play and which way they’re going to go about it.
“There’s going to be a huge emphasis on players to give us ideas as well. We don’t claim to know it all.”
Joyce’s forwards slipped up by breaching the 3/3 rule three times in the first half.
Alex Beirne, who top scored for Kildare with nine points, tapped over routine frees at the other end on each occasion.
Tribe gaffer Joyce said: “If you go close to the halfway line and your man takes off, your natural instinct is, ‘I don’t want to be seen as lazy, I have to take off after my man’. We got caught a few times on that one but look, it’s something we’ll keep working on.”
BIG FEATURE
A big feature of the game was goalkeepers being forced to go long with their kick-outs.
Short, clipped kick-outs often are not an option now with the ball having to travel from the 20m line to beyond the 40m arc.
Kildare’s first point was a Ryan Sinkey score that came after a long Galway kick-out to a 50-50 battle that went the Lilies’ way.
The game was still in the balance and tied at 1-7 to 0-10 when Conroy came on in the 47th minute.
He proceeded to reel off four scores from outside the arc — one more than the three he managed in last July’s All-Ireland final loss to Armagh.
Joyce said: “He’s only back in, this was his first day with us. He’s doing a bit of training on his own.
“He’s not in bad shape in fairness. He wanted to play a little bit, get used to the new rules so he enjoyed it anyway.”
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