Sometimes you get a moment when the penny drops and you realise you are not what you are or what you imagined yourself to be, writes An Fear Rua …

It can be that time when you’re bearing down on the goal in the Junior C county final in injury time, your side has clawed themselves back to a two point gap, the hopes and aspirations of an entire parish weigh on your shoulders and you scuff the ball just inches wide of the post. After the kick out, the ref puffs the final whistle.

On a more personal level, it might be a winter’s morning when the light strikes the shaving mirror in a certain way and you realise that the baggy eyes and greying locks smirking back at you are really you and not some distant ancestor. Others will remember different examples: that diminishing moment in the night club when the attractive blonde refuses your offer of a drink with ’Gedoutavit! You could be my father!’ Or a long-trusted colleague is unmasked as conspiring behind your back to bad mouth with you with your boss.

These are what we call epiphany moments. Instant flashes where great truths are revealed and, as a result, the rest of your life may change irrevocably. The great Apostle, Paul, encountered one on the road to Damascus and look what it did to him.

Last Sunday, during the International Rules game against Australia, Gaelic football players, fans, administrators and analysts must have gone through something similar.

In recent years, we have convinced ourselves that Gaelic football today is somehow faster, tougher, fitter, more skilful, better coached, better prepared, more exciting than ever before. Some pathetic folks even gloat over those late night showings of ‘All Ireland Gold’ on TG4 and pass disparaging comments on the footballers of the seventies and eighties. Well, whatever attributes those guys may or may not have had, they never lacked for pride, spirit or good old-fashioned ‘bottle’. Our good friend, Dessie Farrell, and the Gaelic Players’ Association have done a big job in recent years in marketing this new image of football and footballers.

Yet, much of this careful construct was washed away in the debris of the last Sunday’s dismal encounter at Croke Park. The Irish dipped their toe in the pool of aggression first, didn’t like it when the Aussies responded more than in kind and backed off considerably after those five manic minutes of opening madness. After that, fear and loathing – probably in equal measure – stalked the Irish camp.

Then there is this patronising nonsense about the Australians’ unfamiliarity with the ‘round’ ball. That, somehow, this gives us an advantage over them. Over the two games of the series, the facts are: by far the best kicking of the ball… by far the better scores … by far the better running onto the ball … by far the better running off the ball … by far the better high catching of the ball … by far the better tactical approaches … all came from poor Aussies mesmerised by the unfamiliar ‘round’ ball. Do we think they’ve never kicked a soccer ball in their lives? Did we think they’d never be professional enough to train intensively with a round ball?

And the Irish? There were some honourable exceptions. Kieran McGeeney stood out and enhanced his reputation. Most of the rest demonstrated an ineptness of ‘read’ of the game, of handling, passing and of shooting that is almost inexplicable in players of their experience and seniority in the game. It was as if they had checked in even their most rudimentary Gaelic football skills with their gear when they got off the team coach in Croker. Because they certainly weren’t visible to most of the 82,000 fans present. It makes you wonder what exactly they were doing during all that training and preparation they had beforehand.

Let’s face it. Sunday brutally exposed the major deficiencies and low standards of modern day Gaelic football. The fact is, the Irish did not even perform as good athletes, no matter what rules or code they were playing under.

Sunday’s outcome will have some value if we look at it frankly and see what we can do about it. The worrying thing is that the ‘skills’ Ireland displayed are all too evident at club level and, even worse, at under age level. A young man who can ‘catch and kick’ cleanly, or who can foot pass accurately over thirty or forty metres is increasingly the exception rather than the rule. It will take a frank re-appraisal and virtual re-invention of our modern coaching programmes from under age right up to senior inter-county level before we get this right. And this will take time before it comes right.

Since the great surge of interest in the nineties – the Northern breakthrough, the Bank of Ireland sponsorship, the Qualifiers – Gaelic football has been skating on thin ice. Football is dying out in many former strongholds, being replaced by soccer, rugby or Play Station. It may take another five to ten years, but eventually this breakdown at parish level will begin to feed in detrimentally to the game at inter-county level and by then it will be too late to stop the rot. Football will become a diminishing sport, outgunned in participation, media and audience by soccer or rugby and certainly by a combination of both. A bit like what’s been happening to Australian Rules in the last two or three years, in fact.

Maybe this is an issue Dessie and the GPA lads might now take up with equal enthusiasm? In the short term, there may be no money in it for them. But, in the long term, the very existence of the game as we know it may, literally, be up for ‘catch and kick’…

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We couldn’t even beat the Scots at feckin’ Shinty!

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