Ciarán Murphy: Who dares challenge the finely balanced scale of risk and reward?

Oisín McConville, the top scorer in the history of the Ulster championship, tells a great story against himself.

He was coach of the Dundalk IT Trench Cup team, and for four years, he had been trying to ingrain a killer instinct in their play. One of the central tenets of this mindset was “never, EVER fist a point when a goal is on”. Not alone is it brave, it also sends a message to the opposing team – when these boys get a chance to take the game by the scruff of the neck, they won’t be found wanting. It was a statement, and not just on the scoreboard.

Coming from one of the most lethal forwards of this century, these words carried real meaning. If this was a guiding principle in his football life, and it took him all the way to a man-of-the-match award for Armagh in the 2002 All-Ireland final, then who were we to doubt?

Until Covid hit, the 2002 All-Ireland semi-final was shown on television ... and there he was, in glorious technicolour, punching over the winning score against Dublin with the goal gaping.

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So it’s less of a guiding principle, more of a situation-dependent judgment call, then.

It’s an easy thing to say, obviously – to just go for broke. Don’t die wondering. And then you’re a 23-year-old scratching around the Monaghan panel for two years, having taken a year out because lack of game time was getting you down so much, you play really well on your Ulster championship debut, you’re given the chance to fist the equaliser in a classic, and instead you boot the winning goal in the fifth minute of injury-time.

I was unavoidably away from my television on Sunday afternoon, but when I got back to the house on Sunday evening, having not seen the goal but been made aware via Twitter of what Ryan O’Toole (for he is the debutant in question) had done, I had a very clear picture in my mind of the goal he must have scored.

And then I saw the chance he’d actually taken, and I was shocked all over again. I fully expected him to have been presented with a chance so gilt-edged that he couldn’t not take on the goal. That it was a gimme, and he couldn’t help himself. The actual risk he took was so much bigger than I had expected.

There was no more than a 30 per cent chance of a strike from that position going in. And even the kick itself – he didn’t aim for the crossbar hoping it might go in. He drilled it along the ground, and who could blame Morgan if he’d been caught a little off-guard – it was a clearcut case of really, really bad decision-making nevertheless paying a handsome dividend.

[ Jim McGuinness: Hard to know if Tyrone can return to their 2021 All-Ireland winning levels ]

Because it all comes down to risk. It became increasingly clear as we watched the two games from Ulster last weekend that there is one footballer in particular who is allowed to take as many risks as he likes – and that’s the footballer in every team least qualified to take them. The goalkeeper.

There is much to like in the sport at the moment, and the Tyrone-Monaghan game was a brilliant example of what it can throw up when conditions are right. But it strikes me as absolutely bizarre that teams now set up in an extraordinarily risk-averse way in so many parts of the game, but nevertheless leave their goal line completely empty for large swathes.

Goalkeepers are now asked to come out 60 or 70 yards from goal and get involved in the play, because turnovers are seen as the greatest evil in the game. The goalkeeper will always be the backdoor ball, the pass of last resort, because they won’t ever have anyone marking them. But their presence 70 yards from their goal line means turnovers are also 100 times more dangerous now.

So wing backs will now never try to kick a foot pass because if it’s turned over, your goalie better be able to motor backwards at high speed. Keepers on the other hand are much happier to try to pick a pass, as Rory Beggan did so beautifully for Monaghan’s first goal on Sunday.

One may have thought that Damien Comer’s goal for Galway in last year’s All-Ireland semi-final, with Derry goalie Odhrán Lynch jogging back over the halfway line as the ball flew into his net, may have been a turning point – a moment when coaches decide they have no problem with keepers being the backdoor ball, as long as they don’t get ahead of the ball at any time.

But judging by this weekend, they’re still happy enough to roll the dice. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, and the palpitations as a number one with no faith in his own abilities (never mind what the crowd makes of them) sallies forth, add a frisson of danger to the interminable strings of passes we saw in so many games in this year’s league if nothing else. Risk and reward are tied together. Ryan O’Toole’s number came up big on Sunday, and here’s hoping it catches on.