Ciarán Murphy: Penalties a test of skill when the pressure is most intense

We in the chattering classes, of which the sports hack is of course a much respected and pre-eminent force, should perhaps take a moment to give thanks to Galway and Armagh, who gave us all a season’s worth of drama last Sunday.

The bust-up which has so exercised the Taoiseach, the Sports Minister, and the TV and radio panel shows appears to have eaten up most of this week’s bandwidth, allowing the poison that is the penalty shoot-out to be injected into our game almost as an afterthought.

The reaction from many pundits has been one of shock and disappointment that such a method (already used twice this summer to eliminate intercounty teams, lest we forget) could be used to decide a game of this magnitude.

This just isn’t a part of our games, we’ve been told . . . even if Armagh have, alas, been missing penalties in Croke Park since 1953. Billy McCorry missed one in that year’s All-Ireland final, and Oisín McConville famously missed one at the Canal End in the 2002 final as well.

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Oisín was at Billy McCorry’s funeral, and heard the penalty miss being discussed by the chief celebrant, so he knows better than most that these misses tend to attach themselves to players.

McConville ended his career as the top scorer in the history of the Ulster championship, so that miss in 2002 came as a surprise, most of all to himself. Then again, he told us on the Second Captains podcast this week that if he’d been given his choice of all 52 players on both squads to score a penalty to save his life, he would have had absolutely no hesitation whatsoever in picking Stefan Campbell.

He was money in the bank. And yet Campbell hit one of the worst penalties you’ve ever seen. Which leads one to ask – what is top-level sport if it is not the ultimate examination of heart, nerve, and ability?

The game had already seen moments of brilliance under the most intense pressure. Rian O’Neill’s free at the end of ordinary time will go down as one of the truly great frees ever taken in Croke Park. The pressure on him to land that to force extra-time is a far different pressure to the pressure of him landing it to put Armagh a point up.

If you’re standing over a free with the last kick of ordinary time to win a game, you know the worst-case scenario is extra-time. All it costs you is a first opportunity to win it all – the second opportunity is still there, another 20 minutes of game-time. If you have a kick to level the game, you know it either goes over, or you go home.

If that free doesn’t go over, you can be sure there would have been plenty of people enquiring as to why he didn’t play it short, try and work a better shooting position, or try and win a free closer to goal. That was the percentage play. But heroes instinctively know when they need to step up and be a hero.

Give that free to 95 per cent of intercounty players under no pressure whatsoever and they still probably wouldn’t be able to kick it. Give players the chance that Cillian McDaid hit to force the game to penalties, and I’m sure that at least 60 per cent of them would make it under no pressure.

But what McDaid did, after almost 100 minutes of football, was still sensational. It took football ability, for sure, but it took nerve, and it took heart. These are just inarguably key components of a good footballer.

The argument that penalty shoot-outs ask something of our players that they’re not accustomed to simply doesn’t stack up. Ball-striking is absolutely a key skill of the game.

Any intercounty forward worth their salt has probably taken dozens of penalties for their clubs over their career. You might say that hardly equates to what the Galway and Armagh players had to go through on Sunday, but that’s hardly the point. Just because he’d never taken a penalty in a World Cup final penalty shoot-out before didn’t mean it was unfair on Roberto Baggio in 1994.

The reaction of both managers might have revealed more of their own character than a true indication of their feeling on the fairness or otherwise of penalties. Kieran McGeeney obviously felt any disparaging remarks about penalties would be construed as sour grapes, and Pádraic Joyce was perhaps eager to show a little bit of fellow-feeling between the camps given . . . well, given what we’ve all spent most of the last three days talking about.

Joyce may not like the idea of penalties, but he had his squad practising them since December. This idea wasn’t plucked from thin air.

Asking intercounty forwards to beat a goalkeeper from 11 metres is extremely pressurised, but it’s not alien to any of them. Galway’s ability to do it better than Armagh when the pressure was at its most intense was a test of skill worthy of deciding a wonderful Gaelic football game.

[ Darragh Ó Sé: The worst thing about Sunday’s melee is politicians making hay out of it ]