Five Things We Learned this GAA weekend: Derry find breaking the shoot-out rules pays off

Glass breaks all the rules but pays no penalty

Conor Glass did everything you’re not supposed to do in a penalty shoot-out. First off, he probably shouldn’t have been taking one at all. As Shane McGuigan and Paul Cassidy went ahead of him, Glass was down on the ground back on the 45-metre line, trying to stretch out his calves. His first cramp had appeared a minute into extra-time and had lingered ever since. The rules say you don’t send an injured player to take a penalty in a shoot-out.

The rules also say that above all else, a kicker has to do what a kicker has decided to do. You go up to take your kick with a plan in your head and you stick to that plan. You do not, under any circumstances, change your mind. You definitely do not change your mind in your run-up.

Take it away, Conor.

“You don’t know what you’re going to do until you’re actually there,” Glass told us afterwards. “I was going to go the other side of the net. I don’t know, my mind just froze and I said, ‘Right, I’ll go the other way.’ You don’t actually know until the circumstance comes up.

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“I changed my mind in the run-up, literally a second before I kicked the ball. I seen Ethan Rafterty kept going across himself. I would have gone to my left on the previous penalties and that’s where I was going to go. So I said, I have to change my mind here. Thankfully it went in underneath the crossbar. I couldn’t tell you what I was thinking.”

So much for rules. – Malachy Clerkin

Tailteann Cup gets off to an inauspicious start

In a room somewhere under the main stand in Páirc Tailteann on Saturday evening, Colm O’Rourke quietly defused the suspect item wrapped up in newspaper print.

It arrived the morning before, when Dónal Óg Cusack, O’Rourke’s former colleague on The Sunday Game, said that the Tailteann Cup, “which if you haven’t heard of it”, is a “sort of Gaelic football Grand National for disappointed also-rans”.

Now, the Meath manager may not have needed such material to rise his players in the dressing room before they played Tipperary in their opening game, still it was cheap shot and a definite slight.

Cusack has been weeping for hurling of late, and should have realised he might easily have been saying the same about the Joe McDonagh or Nicky Rackard Cups when it comes to hurling.

Anyway, O’Rourke wasn’t bothered, saying firstly he “didn’t find it any way insulting”, before adding: “The Tailteann Cup is a great competition. It did a lot for the likes of Westmeath last year and we saw Cavan and so many others taking it seriously.”

In truth however the opening round was low key, O’Rourke’s assessment it was a great competition not aided by the fact his team had just beaten Tippeary by double scores, 1-19 to 0-11, and with Waterford to come this weekend, their play-off spot already seems certain.

Last year, the 2022 Tailteann Cup had 16 games, and eight of those were decided by a goal or less. On the opening weekend of the round robin format, the margins were not always so close.

Antrim handed Leitrim a 3-18 to 2-12 defeat, and in Tullamore, Offaly kept things to script by seeing off London with a 2-14 to 0-11 opening victory, just as one-sided as what happened in Navan.

Other games were closer: in Enniskillen, Wexford came from six points down (1-7 to 0-4) at half-time to earn a draw with hosts Fermanagh, while Carlow came from five points down in the closing 12 minutes to beat Wicklow, 0-17 to 1-13, a game of some excitement in Aughrim.

But a great competition? Maybe when it gets to the play-offs, but after the opening weekend there is a sense some of those playing are already also-rans. – Ian O’Riordan

Davy might struggle to find momentum in Waterford without first season bounce

In Davy Fitzgerald’s management career the pattern has been for an early bounce. He famously led Waterford to the 2008 All-Ireland final only a couple of months after taking charge. With the inestimable help of Paul Kinnerk he led Clare to an All-Ireland in his second season as manager in 2013 and he made a fast impact in Wexford too. They won promotion from Division Two in his first season and reached their first Leinster final in a decade in the same year; two years later, they won it.

The performance of that Wexford group, though, dipped in years four and five of Fitzgerald’s stewardship, and in the first year of his second spin with Waterford there has been no appreciable bounce. They rattled Limerick, could have won, maybe should have won, and didn’t. Since then they have exited the championship with two comprehensive defeats.

He made it clear on Saturday that he was going to hang around for the fight, and that he had already spoken to the players in the dressing room about the up-coming off-season.

“We know we have one or two issues to sort out,” he said. “We knew that after the Cork game. We know we’re going to get a bit of stick back home and we deserve it and that’s fine, but we’re not going to run away from the issues. We know what they are, we’re going to deal with them and we’re going to come back fighting.”

Fitzgerald declined to say what the issues were. Reviving this group of Waterford players is probably the greatest challenge of Fitzgerald’s career to date. – Denis Walsh

Phlegmatic McGeeney lifts his head and sees light on the horizon

Ulster keeps the flag flying for the provincial football championships. After a series of turkey shoots elsewhere, champions Derry and challengers Armagh – at last back in the final after 15 years – served up a great contest, like a middle distance race when neither side could quite out-kick the other. Gripping but not in the stereotypical Ulster sense.

Historic too, as the Anglo-Celt became the first provincial trophy to be decided by penalties.

Armagh lost on the shootout after extra time had failed to prise apart the teams. There was surprise that the county, having exited last year’s All-Ireland in similar fashion hadn’t in the meantime drilled the players so hard that they could dispatch the kicks with eyes closed.

Kieran McGeeney though displayed a comparatively Zen reaction to the manner of defeat.

“Every session we take penalties. It’s a thing now you just have to get it. Penalties are a funny thing. It is not like a skillset; it is a pressure thing being able to deal with that. Two penalties in front of you, there are so many permutations. In fairness to the keeper, three penalties that were hit were good penalties round the corner. They were good saves; they weren’t bad penalties.”

Whether or not you agree with his assessment of the kicks – his team have now converted two from seven in championship shootouts – why cloud the Armagh manager’s determinedly sunny disposition?

Anyway, McGeeney has form in the debate. After last year’s All-Ireland quarter-final exit, he dispensed with all the boilerplate pieties about it being such a terrible way to decide a match.

“It’s just the way sport is. It’s cruel. Going to replays and stuff is not fair on supporters either, the way things are. Coming to Dublin is an expensive thing to do. It’s not ideal to do it. It’s a pure lottery.”

At least this year, Armagh’s season is not finished and their performance on Sunday suggested that they will be a significant presence in the All-Ireland series. That, more than the capricious conclusion to the Ulster championship may be uppermost in the manager’s mind. – Seán Moran

Paywalls or Dublin beatings - some things are better off being out of sight and out of mind

Populism is a weathervane, it only takes a slight breeze for it to change direction. It seems the great GAAGO palaver of 2023 has peaked, the shallow outrage has dried up for now. It was quite the unseemly show as politicians from all sides fell over each other last week to join the hastily formed new party of Fíor Gael. There are votes to be gained in supporting populist outrage, the optics are always better to be sitting beside the old lonely farmer living up on the side of a craggy moss-covered mountain than cosying up beside the suits in Croke Park, who have long since forgotten it was that same old man who built the GAA.

No, the only time to be seen sitting beside the Croke Park suits is when you’ve summoned them to the Oireachtas. Anyhow, the Waterford hurlers played Clare on GAAGO at the weekend and the Cavan footballers were live on the streaming platform as they beat Laois. There wasn’t much outcry afterwards. Dublin hammered Louth, live on RTÉ, but nobody would have complained if that had been put behind a paywall too. The Leinster SFC has been out of sight and largely out of mind for the general sports fan for over a decade now. And while it is easy to argue that it’s not right, we’re used to Dublin rolling through Leinster. We’ll get used to GAAGO, too. Now the hullabaloo has died away. – Gordon Manning