Win the kickouts and take it from there

It’s Sunday evening. The Sunday Game will be on in a couple of hours. I hope they don’t spend too long on the hurling.

It’s the most I’ve looked forward to it in a long time. I’ve managed to avoid hearing any results from the Leinster football quarter finals and so I can’t wait to watch the highlights.

If it’s anything like its soccer counterpart, it’ll be terrific viewing. I’ve long since held the view that soccer is best watched through highlights. Ninety minutes of it can be tedious enough, but there’s enough good stuff in any game to make it look exciting when condensed down to a five or six-minute reel.

That’s why Match of the Day was my favourite TV show for years. In recent times, it’s become harder and harder to avoid spoilers. Every time I pick up the phone it seems there are Premier League updates.

Way back when, in the good old days, there’d be Trevor Brooking and Alan Hansen with a few short minutes of analysis after each game, expertly steered by Des Lynam at the wheel. The viewing experience for the Premier League peaked back then in my opinion.

It’s still a good watch, but the behemoth that is Sky Sports has squashed its relevance in the mainstream. Andy Gray has a lot to answer for. He’s rightly thought of as a great analyst and a pioneer in some ways in the in-depth, forensic reviews of the big moments.

Sky’s approach contrasted to BBC’s Match of the Day package. Sky went all out and gave bucket loads of time to analysis pre and post-game. Talk about overkill. Paralysis by analysis. No goal could be scored without Gray pointing out some minute mistake by a defender.

Newsflash: in every goal that’s ever been scored, you could find fault with the defending if you look hard enough. Gray loved this kind of analysis though and it was obviously very popular as it has continued to this day and, if anything, gotten even more in-depth.

The same, I’m afraid, is happening in Gaelic Games too. More subtly though, and it’s more avoidable, in an it’s-out-there-if-you-want-it kind of way. There’s a fair few podcasts available now with GAA analysts getting deeper into the nitty gritty of the tactical nuances of the game.

As I say, it’s great if you’re interested in it.

One game that has been seriously over-analysed is the league final between Donegal and Kerry. It’s as if people believe Jim McGuinness has reinvented football once more with the ultra-slow attacks and incisive line breaks at the right moment to torment Kerry. The talk has been that this is the only way to go now.

I’d swear Antrim have bought into that nonsense. I watched the first half of their Ulster championship with Derry and they went hell for leather at not going hell for leather, if you know what I mean. One of the pundits at half time even suggested that this was a clever tactic to slow the game down and was keeping them in the game. Jesus wept!

Donegal didn’t have some new-fangled attacking plan to beat Kerry. They were moving better and faster than their opponents on the day, and so opened up plenty of overlap opportunities and consequently got easy scores. It was excellent by them, but I can’t see that athleticism gap being there when they meet further down the line.

No, Jim McGuinness has not been in his laboratory all winter and emerged with this Kerry-proof set of tactics. In fact, had they been allowed, I’d say they’d have attacked in much the same way in last year’s All-Ireland final.

They never got the chance though. It’s the kickouts. That’s the key. You’ve got to get good clean possession off kickouts and then you can do whatever you want in attack.

The scoring rate is very high across the board in football these days. The most important battle, therefore, is to ensure you have more of the ball than the opposition. If anything, I could see some of our football analysis beginning to sound more like rugby.

The oval-ball fans talk a lot about “go-forward ball” and “winning the collisions”. In football now, if you can win kickouts cleanly or on the break and attack quickly, and do this regularly, you’re a heck of a long way towards winning the game.

That’s what I’m most focussed on for Roscommon this Sunday in Castlebar. We’ve got to be uber-competitive on kickouts — on “both sides of the ball” as the rugby-heads might say. If we can do that, then we’re in with a great chance.

We have the personnel to do it. Keith Doyle looked like he was coming into his best form towards the end of the league. Conor Ryan has been a big positive in his first year on the team and it’s a partnership with real promise. The supporting cast are very important as regards the fight for breaking ball. Senan Lambe, Eoin Ward, Darragh Heneghan and Dylan Ruane have huge games ahead of them in this respect.

If it turns into a game where teams are breaking even on kickouts, it’ll be a fascinating battle. Can we curb the influence of Ryan O’Donoghue? For all the excitement about Mayo since Andy Moran took over, and there has been a fair bit, they do seem very reliant on O’Donoghue to keep them ticking up front.

They’ll try to batter the Roscommon defence with powerful runs and brilliant support play, as is typical of them. If we repel those initial assaults though, it’ll be their number 11 who’ll be looping around the ball carrier to get a shot off or thread an incisive pass over the top of our defence.

It’s one thing identifying their biggest threat, it’s another thing stopping him as he is a top class player.

In a Roscommon-slanted analysis, you’d hope that, given 50/50 possession stats, we’d have enough options going forward to seriously trouble the Mayo defence. I think we do, but Daire Cregg will be a big loss in this regard.

It’s a very tough one to predict in many ways. Mayo are favourites. We’ll fancy our chances at the same time. The build-up has been perfect for Mayo. They finished the league off with a blow-out win and while the London trip was a minor inconvenience, they’ve had a good four-week run-in to this game.

Roscommon, on the other hand, had that bad day at the end of the league in McHale park and then the New York fixture will have taken a chunk out of their training preparations for Mayo. Mark Dowd and company will have done a mighty fine job if they have the lads purring and ready to give their best performance of the year this Sunday.

Once more so, we travel in hope. Let’s win the kickout battle and take it from there.

Meanwhile, The Sunday Game has started with the hurling. Will we all be tuning in next Sunday night to look back on a famous win?