The question I have been asked most often since Sunday is “did you see the match?” More often than not it has been a rhetorical question because, before I get a chance to reply, the statement “wasn’t it terrible?” follows.
Well I did see the match, and in truth, it was terrible, but in a fascinating way. It was very poor fair as a Gaelic Football game. But if you leave aside the fact that it was supposed to be Gaelic Football, it was a very interesting contest in the social economic dimension of “game theory”
Game Theory is a form of mathematics which studies and tries to predict how people react to each other in the various systems and markets in which they live. John Nash won a Nobel Prize for his work in game theory. Russell Crowe played the role of John Nash in the file A Beautiful Mind.
In last Sunday’s All-Ireland football semi-final you had two teams. One team Dublin, are highly resourced with a large pool of players and a sound financial backing. The other Donegal, are geographically isolated, with a small population of players and have played third, if not fourth fiddle to Tyrone, Armagh and Down for the past 20 years. The system or the market in which this contest took place was the rules of Gaelic Football. The ultimate reward is the chance to contest the All-Ireland final and become champions.
From the minute he took charge of the team, the Donegal manager knew he had problems. Donegal were a Division Two league team. They managed to win the Division Two title but that is along way off winning an All-Ireland title. Especially nowadays when the “backdoor system” ensures that the best teams have to be beaten twice before they are eliminated from the championship.
Jim McGuinness knew that if he followed conventional playing systems Donegal didn’t stand a chance. As he said after the game on Sunday, “We did not want to go down in flames”. Rather than sacrifice Donegal’s year’s work on the altar of gallant losers, where he would receive a pat on the back and be told by all and sundry, “sure ye were great to get that far” Jim McGuinness devised his own system.
McGuinness came to the same conclusion as the voodoo worshiping character Pedro Cerrano in the film Major League. Cerrano knelt before the statue of his voodoo god that he kept in his locker and prayed for inspiration. When he didn’t feel inspired, he caught the statue, flung it to the ground and said “F**k you, I’ll do it myself”. The plan he devised may be unconventional but, it was within the rules of Gaelic Football.
You have to admire how Donegal set about doing this. It must have take incredible commitment from players to learn the new system of play in training. On top of this, every player on the field had to utterly sacrifice his natural urge to play ball. The result was incredibly repugnant to the spectator, but they, who said it is Donegal’s duty to conform to others people’s expectations.
What Jim McGuinness and Donegal did was develop an efficient system that suited their resources. This is all very well if you are John Nash on your way to winning the Nobel Prize for Game Theory. The GAA public however, are not interested in efficiency, they want entertainment. This week Donegal find that their vision of efficiency is more outrageous than Bill Gates of Microsoft when he announced that his ambition was to have a computer on every desk and in every home. The danger for Gaelic Football fans is that Bill Gates fulfilled his ambition.
Because Dublin finally wore Donegal down last Sunday, the danger has passed. Or at least that is what we will be led to believe in the build up to the first Dublin v Kerry All-Ireland final of the 21st century. The reality is a bit more frightening. Dublin’s current style of play is not really very different to that of Donegal. The significant differences between the two sides are that Dublin have been learning their version of the system for two seasons, they have a better balanced team than Donegal and they get more players than Donegal into scoring positions.
We can expect to see a role reversal in the All-Ireland final. Dublin will be the team trying to get players behind the ball and blocking the channels of supply to the Kerry forwards. If they succeed and win the All-Ireland final, which is not improbable, then their style of play will be copied by other counties.
This begs the question what can be done about this? There is no easy answer. Many of the rule changes to Gaelic Football that have been made over the years were introduced with the expressed intention of speeding up the flow of the game. These changes included the introduction allowing for quickly taken frees. The hand pass, as opposed to the old-fashioned fist pass, was introduced, and modified, to allow players move the ball quickly through the field. This was followed by frees be taken from the hand and then sideline kicks been taken from the hand. The general idea has always been to allow teams to get the ball quickly to their forwards.
Now “Game Theory” had caught up with the innovations and coaches, having grappled with the problem of stopping the ball moving quickly through the field for more than two decades, have decided that no ball can move through a defence of 10, 11 or 12 defenders.
It is a difficult proposition for the administrators to deal with. The rugby authorities encountered a similar problem some years ago when flankers were breaking off the scrum early and closing down the opposition half-backs. The authorities changed the law on binding in the scrum. This kept the flankers bound to the back of the scrum until the ball emerged. The change freed up enough time and space for the scrum-half to get the ball to the out-half and the problem was solved.
The question is what rules can you change in Gaelic Football to free up space in front of the goal? Or how can you make it unrewarding to for a team to have 12 defenders within 30 meters of their goal? One way might be to give a greater reward for long-range points, as happens in basketball. Shots that go over the crossbar from outside the ‘D’ for example, could be worth two points. Or, allow no more than two defenders to tackle a player in possession of the ball.
All this will be of little consolation to Jim McGuinness and Donegal. Even though they may not have played great football, they challenged convention and advanced much further in the championship than if they played a conventional. The have also forced every other team and administrators to think about how they can play the game. These are all positives.
But let’s hope that Jim McGuinness will not become the Bill Gates of Gaelic Football and that some day all games will be played out like last Sunday’s. Hopefully, he will develop the revolution he has started in a more positive way. As another computer giant, Apple’s Steve Jobs once said about his experiences on innovation. “Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations.”