Looking Past the GAA's Black Card Propaganda

The science of statistics, for all the black arts associated with it, has one golden rule. It is this: correlation does not imply causation.

Because A and B happened in sequence does not mean that A caused B, or that B is the result of A. If it starts raining on the day you leave home without your coat, that does not mean that your coatlessness caused the shower. It is much more likely the rain was caused by the meeting of weather fronts of different temperatures than your own childlike optimism.

In much the same way, the black card statistics trumpeted so loudly by the GAA at the end of last week should be met with a certain skepticism. All statistics should be met with skepticism of course, but ones make causal claims as – shall we say, ambitious? – as these are very difficult to take.

The press release on the GAA’s own website boldly claimed that “With the introduction of the black card, the average number of points per game in the 2014 championship is roughly 9.5% higher than in 2013; the number of points scored has increased by just shy of five points per game since 2010.”

When you read “2010,” you may have heard a loud whirring sound. That is the sound of spinning. 2010 has nothing on God’s green earth to do with the black card. The only reason its tagged on there is because five sounds like a lot.

The black card has not been popular, not least as so few people know what exactly a black card offense is. But rather than admit they got it wrong, the GAA finds itself like the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, denying the bleeding obvious. They are fooling nobody who takes a minute to think about it.

But if the black card isn’t the reason there were more scores in Gaelic football in 2014 than there were in 2013, what is? It could be any one of a number of reasons.

Gavin Cummiskey in the Irish Times theorises that “Dublin’s record -breaking summer of scoring must be factored into the increase.” Bless. This blog has taken Cummiskey at his word, and has indeed factored Dublin’s record-breaking summer into the increase.

If you remove the games that Dublin won from the 2014 scoring averages, the average total score per game drops from 34.92 to 34.4. The earth really didn’t move because of Dublin.

So what could it be? Are there any patterns deeper in the data?

Here are two tables. The first shows the average total points per game since the qualifiers were introduced in 2001, broken down by year and competition (the four provincial championships, the qualifiers and the All-Ireland series that starts in August).

And here are the average margins, broken down the same way.

The numbers are colour-coded, from green for the highest totals or margins, into white for average, down to red for the lowest. There is no sharp correlation between margin and totals per game, but there is certainly a case to be made for further investigation into the idea that the current inequality of the Championship is a greater factor in more points being scored.

Are more points being scored because more hidings are being handed out than heretofore? Look at Connacht. Is it a co-incidence that the highest scoring totals coincide with the current Mayo dominance?

Look at Ulster. Ulster is consistently lowest in totals and lowest in margin of victory. But isn’t a low margin of victory a good thing? Doesn’t it mean the games were competitive? Doesn’t everybody know that Ulster is easily the most competitive province? So why are the GAA squawking about point totals as measures of football excellence?

The statistics for the All-Ireland series sit badly with the theory that the greater scoring is significant of teams getting hammered rather than beautiful football being encouraged by the introduction of the black card – the high totals are not matched by high margins, as they are for some years in the other competitions.

But there are mitigating factors here. Firstly, the last eight teams in the country are the best teams in the country. This has been established in both theory and practice over the past five or more years. Naturally, then, these teams score more than teams that aren’t as good.

It was also in the All-Ireland series that the referees’ reluctance to issue black cards became glaringly obvious. The GAA press release tells us that black cards were issued at a rate of 0.8 per Championship game. How many of those black cards were issued in the All-Ireland series?

Four black cards were issued in the eight games of the All-Ireland series. One in the four quarter-finals, two in the three semi-finals, and one in the final. That’s a rate of 0.5 cards per Championship Game among the games that were the highest-scoring of all, contrasted with the 0.8 overall average in the Championship.

The GAA are taking the seanfhocal literally, and are trying to say black is white. End this black card farce now.

Why Do Kerry Keep Winning?

There have been two great Kerry generations in the past thirty years. There was the Golden Years team of the 1970s and 80s, featuring men so famous in the game they are known by one name only –Jacko, Ogie, Páidí, Bomber. And there is the Darragh Ó Sé generation, where that great man had the likes of Paul Galvin, Colm Cooper and, of course, his brothers Tomás and Marc to help him out.

But it is mistaken analysis to think that that Kerry rack up All-Irelands the way they do because they enjoy golden generations the way the hurlers of Cork, Kilkenny or Tipp enjoy golden generations. No. Kerry lead the pack in terms of football All-Irelands won, thirty-seven titles in comparison to Dublin’s twenty-four in second place, because whenever a year looks like being below average, when a title is there to be picked up a team that is not outstanding, it’s generally Kerry that do the picking-up.

Above anything, Kerry are hungry for titles. Hungry in a way that’s hard to describe to those who have never experienced such a combination of want and obligation. If Kerry have a choice of playing to tradition or playing to win, they will play to win one hundred per cent of the time, because winning is the only thing. And what’s more, Kerry are dead right in doing so.

All-Irelands are won against teams in the here-and-now. They are not won against some mythical standard, existing pristine and immaculate in the collective Gaelic imagination.

Kerry go into every game knowing what it is they have to do and grim-set and determined to do it. You often hear of lesser teams that “have no Plan B” when they are dumped out of the Championship. You never hear that of Kerry.

Kerry have more plans than the alphabet has letters. Science-fiction fans may remember the second Terminator movie, that featured a virtually-indestructible robot that could adapt itself to its environment, that could be whatever it needed to be in any situation. Reader, that is Kerry football in a nutshell.

You want to play fancy? Kerry will play fancy, and win 3-18 to your 1-22. You want to box? Kerry will box, and win 0-9 to 0-8. It’s all the same to them. There are no asterisks on the roll of honour. All that’s there is a list of years. Thirty-seven of them in Kerry’s case, with room for plenty more.

And that’s exactly what Kerry did yesterday. Instead of being too proud to play Donegal’s game, they played Donegal’s game better than Donegal themselves. You dance with the girls in the hall and nobody, but nobody, does that better than Kerry.

In recent year, the nation outside of the Kingdom has been given a precious insight into just how Kerry look at things, thanks to Darragh Ó Sé’s column in the Irish Times every Wednesday, and Jack O’Connor’s before him. They are invaluable insights into a GAA football county that is like no other, and help us to understand how exactly it is that Kerry maintain standards in their Kingdom, year after year, generation after generation.

For instance: it is a thing in some counties to protect players from reading criticism on social media. The idea is that the players will retire to their bedrooms, weeping at the hurt, and won’t come out in play football anymore. In Kerry, they think a little differently about how to make up-and-coming aware of what life in the big time is like.

Billy Keane recounted a story about David Moran, one of this year’s All-Star midfielders, during his first time on the Kerry panel, when Darragh Ó Sé was still the old bull in the field. Ó Sé hit Moran a slap that left Moran with a badly-cut mouth. Keane asked Ó Sé what the hell he did that for.

“David is too nice,” said Darragh. “I was trying to put a bit of fire in him. He doesn't get it yet just how hard it is.” That’s what it’s like at the top. A bit more severe than some randomer saying that you’re smelly on Twitter.

But Kerry have one other incredible asset that no other county has, or is likely to have anytime soon. Kerry has the richest football tradition in Ireland.

One difference between playing Kerry in Croke Park and playing them in Limerick is that you can hear what the Kerry support are saying. And the amazing thing is, they all say the same thing.

In Mayo, if Aidan O’Shea has possession and is travelling towards goal, from the half-forward to the full-forward line, one-third of the Mayo support will urge him to go on and bury it, one third will implore him to pass, for God’s sake, and the remaining third will beg O’Shea, on their mothers’ lives, to take his bloody point.

In Kerry, they all shout the same thing. Kerry football people know exactly the right thing to do at any particular point in the game. That’s how deep football is in their marrow. And what they don’t know, they learn quickly.

Another county might have folded their tents after the infamous “puke football” semi-final of 2003. Kerry didn’t. Kerry learned how to play the new system, and have won five titles in the eleven years since. What they couldn’t beat, they joined.

And that’s the lesson for all the other counties in Ireland, now that the 2014 season is over. If you want to beat them, you have to join them. You must do as the best does if you’re to live with them and hope to beat them.

But that’s for another year. In the meantime, hard luck Donegal, and well done Kerry, deserving All-Ireland winners of 2014.

Galway v Mayo: Never the Same Game Twice

One of the many knocks on the provincial system is that it’s always the same. People say this like it’s a bad thing. But it’s not. It’s a great thing, the very DNA of the Championship itself.

When Queensland play New South Wales in Rugby League’s shuddering State of Origin games, you don’t hear Queenslanders saying they were sick of playing NSW all the time, and why couldn’t they have a crack at Tasmania for a change. But in the football Championship, the almost-annual clashes are said to be, somehow, “boring.”

As another encounter between Mayo and Galway fast approaches at the end of this week it’s instructive to notice that, whatever else you may say about the rivalry, it has been anything but dull. In the modern era – the qualifier era – Mayo and Galway have played ten times, with five wins each.

Both teams have won twice away, and three times at home. There have been no draws and all ten games have been played in the province, never in the qualifiers a la Cork and Kerry.

But in looking back over those ten games, there is no real pattern. There is no story arc, rising and falling with the development arcs of the respective teams. Each game was played on its own merits, with no relation to form that year or the last time the teams met.

The first Mayo v Galway game of the modern era was in Castlebar in 2002, when Michael Moyles charged from midfield to rifle home a goal into the An Sportlann end in the first minute. Sadly for Mayo, that was as good as it got, as Galway slowly and surely reeled them back in a game memorable only for that goal and some very peculiar betting patterns when the Sunday Game decided to make Man of the Match open to a public vote.

Galway won again in 2003 in Salthill, the first seaside meeting between the teams in 1994, when the match swung on a missed Mayo penalty that was followed up by a goal from the subsequent kickout by Declan Meehan, if memory serves. A six-point swing is nearly always fatal.

In 2004, it looked as though Galway were going to bury Mayo where their bones would never be found as Galway went 1-3 to no-score ahead after ten minutes. Galway then had a penalty at the Albany end to nail the lid on the coffin before people had even finished their post-anthem ice-creams but Michael Donnellan – somehow – either pointed or missed the thing entirely. And then, over the course of the next hour, Mayo did what they weren’t, until that time, particularly noted for doing – they clawed their way all the way back for a win.

Galway had their revenge in 2005, when Peter Ford’s first term in charge saw Galway beat Mayo in the Connacht Final in a robust encounter in Salthill.

Ford’s style sat badly with the aristocracy, and two Connacht titles in three years were not enough to save him. In the light of how football has evolved since, would Galway have been better off had they stuck with Ford? Who knows?

2006 was the year of Mickey Moran and John Morrison, a year like no other in Mayo, with starburst formations in the full-forward line, Ger Brady at centre-half forward, negativity left in builders’ skips and all the rest of it. But the eternally level-headed Ford had Galway put it up to Mayo in the Connacht Final in Castlebar, when it took a last-gasp Conor Mortimer free to win the day.

Galway won two straight then, in 2007 thanks to brace of goals by Cormac Bane on a sweltering day in early, early summer in Salthill, and again in 2008 when a Padraic Joyce-inspired Galway won the Nestor Cup in Castlebar by one point.

Galway fell to Kerry in a quarter-final that year, in an epic game played in monsoon conditions – the rain was so heavy that Jones’ Road itself flooded for a while. There was no shame in it, but there was no silverware either, and that’s the bottom line.

Since then, though, it’s been all Mayo. Mayo beat Galway in the Salthill sunshine in 2009 before having their heads stoved in by another old rival in Croke Park, Meath. That win over Galway was the last Championship win for any team managed by John O’Mahony. Sic transit gloria mundi.

Sunday will be the third time Mayo will have played Galway under James Horan. The first was a nail-biting win on a squally wet day in Castlebar; the second a hammering of Galway by Mayo so comprehensive that it’s hard even now to believe that it happened, and we have to wait until the end of this week to see the third encounter’s charms.

That hammering last year served notice to the country that Galway’s line of credit for the All-Irelands of 1998 and 2001 had run out and Galway were now just another team. In Galway, much is made of their inability to win in Croke Park since they beat Meath for their ninth All-Ireland thirteen years ago.

But Galway have only got to Croke Park to lose there five times in the past twelve years. The other seven have seen them dumped out of the Championship in Sligo, Belfast, Navan and, most humiliatingly, twice on home soil. Galway were knocked out of the 2006 Championship when Westmeath beat them in Salthill in the fourth round of the qualifiers, and Wexford beat them in the second round of the qualifiers four years ago this week.

They say that the seeds of an empire’s doom are sown far earlier than its actual fall. Instead of those Croke Park failures, could Galway’s decline be traced back to that Connacht semi-final in 2004, in Castlebar, when Mayo came back from a six-point deficit?

For Mayo people, it would be nice to think so, not least in a week when the rivalry is to resume again. Every Mayo-Galway game is different from the one that went before, and Sunday’s will be different again. Will a new Galway imperium rise in Castlebar, just as it did in 1998? Or will the Mayo backs return Galway’s young tyros to the schoolyard, and her forwards finally click in time for another tilt at the citadel? We’ll have to wait and see.

Mayo Championship Preview 2014

A hallmark of what we may call Horan football is a commitment to defense. It was a feature of his Ballintubber teams, and it’s a feature that continued at county level. If you scored on Mayo, you earned it.

How odd, then, that in Horan’s fourth year in charge, Mayo conceded an average of two goals over their eight League games. Those sixteen goals include three against fourteen-man Dublin and two against fourteen-man Derry. Why are Mayo leaking goals? What’s behind it?

The theories are many. Some said it was the absence of Keith Higgins from his usual station. Some said it was the absence of David Clarke, or Chris Barrett, or Tom Cunniffe. Some said the attacking half-backs leave the full-back line too exposed, and more said it was just an All-Ireland hangover and everything would be fine once the summer came.

But An Spailpín’s mind keeps going back to St Conleth’s Park, that tight little bandbox of a pitch tucked in off the main street in Newbridge, where Mayo played Kildare in the first round of the National League this year. Aidan O’Shea made a clumsy challenge about twenty minutes in, and was served a black card and his marching orders in consequence.

It was a bit harsh and it didn’t seem that big a deal at the time. But there is a thing called the butterfly effect, where something very small can amplify to suddenly become catastrophic. Is it possible that black card awarded to Aidan O’Shea is such a trigger?

With the greatest respect to the man, people automatically assumed that the black card was introduced for the Ryan McMenamins of this world, the hardy wee men who will happily chew broken glass before letting their man score.

But on that cold day in Kildare, it wasn’t a Ricey-esque bit of a boyo that got the line. It was one of the most recognisable and stylish players in the country. And when that happened, did the Mayo players subconsciously think: hold on. I have to watch myself here, or else I’m off and someone of lesser ability than me is on, meaning I’m letting the team down?

Could that explain the suddenly leaky defence? The subconscious is an unruly beast. It can betray you when you least expect it, and without you even knowing about the betrayal until afterwards, if ever.

These are the shifting sands that Mayo must navigate as, once more, they try to pull themselves together for another tilt at the windmill. How do they play defence? Can they return to the full-blooded commitment of last year, epitomised by Tom Cunniffe’s famous hit on Peter Harte?

Mayo are in big trouble if they can’t, because there are few signs that they will be able to win any shootouts. The perpetual knock on Mayo forwards is easy shorthand for lazy journalists. Forwards are a team within a team, and teams can amount to more or less than the sum of their parts. Right now, Mayo are less and the clock is ticking on James Horan to find out why that is.

Nobody wants to hear whining at the time, not least when you lose to Dublin’s greatest team since the days of Sean Doherty, Brian Mullins, Jimmy Keaveney and the rest, but it is a fact that Mayo were bitterly unlucky in the All-Ireland Final last year.

Andy Moran was a risk in one corner after such a long layoff from injury, while Cillian O’Connor, had he been anyone else at all, would have sat this one out too because of his injured shoulder. Add in Alan Freeman’s sickness during the week of the final and James Horan was looking at three empty shirts where a full-forward line ought to be. That Mayo came within a point of Dublin at all was a tremendous achievement.

Horan’s chief mission in the League was to fix that problem, and make the Mayo forwards into a unit that is more than the sum of their parts – this, before the backs started devolving, as outlined already.

But the longer the League went on, the less comfortable Keith Higgins seemed at centre-half forward. Adam Gallagher flared brightly on the wing, and then disappeared. Cathal Carolan got injured. People began to question Alan Freeman. The midfield, strong to begin with, has been improved by the return of Tom Parsons and the excellent form of Jason Gibbons, surely Mayo’s player of the League. But fore and aft of the midfield, there are causes for serious concern.

And yet, with all that said, Mayo are still in a better position than the majority of teams in the Championship. They have experience of winning on the great stage, and are only a small tweak away of suddenly finding the accelerator again. Even now, as I type, barmats are being stripped and the bare sides covered with complex diagrams of forward interplay, drawn by the football people of the heather county as they exchanged theories and formations.

The work is being done, but will it be enough? Who knows? Mayo play the winners of Roscommon and Leitrim in the Connacht semi-final, which will be by no means a gimme. And although Mayo’s record in and aptitude for the Qualifiers is awful, maybe a loss to the winners of Roscommon and Leitrim would be no bad thing. It would give Horan a bit more room for further experimentation than a Connacht Final, where there is no room for experimentation at all.

Sligo have never not risen at the prospect of a Connacht Final and, while Galway appear to be struggling currently, they are not to be trusted even if their fifteen men limped onto the Connacht Final field of glory wearing bandages, ringing bells and shouting “unclean! unclean!” Since 1998, no sensible Mayo person will ever knowingly under-estimate the heron-chokers. They simply can’t be trusted.

But who knows what will happen, really? Championship exists on a different plane to the League, and always has. Were one of the surfeit of current midfielders to go inside as Kieran Donaghy did for Kerry in 2006, could that work the oracle? Or how about two of them, as Donaghy teamed up with Tommy Walsh in the second half of the last decade?

All the possibilities are there, and Horan has the players. Whether he can find the right combination before running out of road is, as ever, the never-ending question. Up Mayo.

Football Championship 2014 Preview

How good are Dublin right now? They’re so good that it’s actually frightening to list their advantages. Send the children out to play, pull the curtains, maybe take a strong drink for your nerves. Here we go.

Firstly, Dublin are in the extraordinary position of being both greater than the sum of their parts, and of having parts that are pretty dang good in the first place. Diarmuid Connolly can win games on his own. Michael Darragh MacAuley, the ultimate twenty-first century footballer, can win games on his own. No inter-county player has ever improved as much as Eoghan O’Gara has between now and when he first burst onto the scene. And so on, and so on.

Secondly, Dublin have home advantage in every game they play. If anything, it’s a double advantage in that their home (and don’t talk about Parnell Park – when was the last time Dublin played a Championship game in Parnell Park?) is the most sacred turf in the entire Gaelic Athletic Association.

Thirdly, the Leinster Championship is currently the worst it’s ever been. It’s 9/1 the field for someone other than Dublin to win the Delaney Cup this summer. If you took the pick of the other ten counties competing, could they keep it kicked out to Dublin? Probably not.

Fourthly, Dublin’s evisceration of Roscommon in this year’s Under-21 football final suggested that Dublin don’t so much have a pipeline of talent coming through as a torrential flood that will wash away all before it. Pat Spillane said on the TV last year that Dublin could dominate football for the next 25 years.

And at that, suddenly, a chink of light. For Dublin to dominate for the next 25 years means that Pat Spillane must be correct in his analysis, and such a thing simply cannot be.

Every dominant team looks unbeatable in its dominance. Until they are beaten, and then suddenly people say well, I was never sure about this, or they were never tested in terms of that, or one hundred and one other things. Barcelona in the soccer this year. The mighty cats of Kilkenny in the hurling last year. There are no unbeatable teams.

In his book Hurling: The Revolution Years, Denis Walsh recounts how Liam Griffin prepared his Wexford hurlers to play Offaly in the 1996 Leinster Final. Offaly were the Leinster kingpins at that time, having played in the last two All-Ireland Finals, winning one, while Wexford had lost sixteen finals in a row, between Leinster and the National League.

Liam Griffin, the Wexford manager, knew that you can’t just pretend those beatings didn’t happen. He hired a psychologist, Niamh Fitzpatrick, to see what she could do to fight the negativity that hung in the air. And it was her idea to ask every member of the Wexford panel to name a reason why Wexford could beat Offaly on Sunday in the team meeting after Wednesday training.

For the first five minutes, there was absolute silence in the room. It was a very long five minutes for Fitzpatrick, who worried that if her idea backfired, it would ruin the team and they’d be butchered.

And then, someone spoke. Fitzpatrick wrote the idea down on a flipchart. Someone else spoke. That idea went down too. By the end of the night, the flipchart had thirty ideas on it, thirty ways by which Wexford could beat Offaly. Liam Dunne went home and told his mother that night that Sunday would be dressed in purple and gold. And so it came to pass.

Are Dublin unbeatable? No, they’re not. It’s just a question of pinpointing what Dublin’s key strengths are, and neutralising them. Easier said than done, of course, but very far from impossible.

Dublin’s empire is built Stephen Cluxton’s precision kickouts, as they guarantee Dublin a constant flow of position. That flow of possession has to be stopped, by whatever means necessary within the rules and the spirit of the game.

Next, a team has to think about MacAuley, Dublin’s fulcrum. MacAuley is central processing unit of Dublin’s imperium. He is Mr Everywhere. Everything goes through him. He’s got to be stopped. And stopping him will hurt, so teams have to be ready to pay that price. Because once MacAuley starts to struggle, the entire team will start to struggle with him.

And then there’s Diarmuid Connolly, the best of a genuinely superb set of forwards. If Connolly gets warmed up he is the best footballer in Ireland, and therefore he cannot be allowed to warm up in the first place.

If your correspondent were to choose any Mayoman of past or present to mark Connolly, I would choose Anthony “Larry” Finnerty. This seems odd, as Finnerty spent his whole career as a corner forward. But when taking on a super-power you have do as Wexford did, and think outside the box.

Finnerty was never a back and probably couldn’t mark a bingo board, but he is one of the wittiest men ever to play Gaelic football. Finnerty’s job would be to keep Connolly apprised of how he’s doing in this particular game, and of other matters pertaining to the city and the world in a constant flow of repartee. This will bring extra pressure on the other five defenders of course, but shutting Connolly down will be worth it.

And as well as all this, of course, your own players have to play like gods – all the above does is reduce Dublin from the Olympian to the merely excellent. But events can build their own momentum, and once the camel gets his nose into the tent, you’d be surprised how quickly the rest of him arrives in afterwards.

So, if not Dublin, who? Is the team that beats Dublin the automatic All-Ireland winner? Yes, of course, if it happens in the final. Not necessarily, if it happens earlier. A team could be spent having beaten Dublin, while all the others up their game, seeing daylight where there was once only the jeering of the Hill. Which means that we can divide up the contenders into those who could beat Dublin and take advantage, those who could beat Dublin only to get beat themselves, and those who could inside track it, and seize a chance left by Dublin’s exit.

There has never been a better team at picking up All-Irelands than Kerry, but whether the current Kerry could beat Dublin – and they want to beat Dublin very, very much – is open to question. Kerry are in a better position to replace the Gooch than any other team and they have an excellent midfield, but the backs are raw and that could cost them. Kerry are never to be ruled out, however.

Cork or Donegal could beat Dublin in theory, but it’s not that likely. Cork need a little seasoning while Donegal are on the slide – it was an impossible dream that the McGuinness lustre would last.

Monaghan could beat Dublin but might not win the All-Ireland. Derry can’t beat Dublin but could win the All-Ireland. Tyrone are the best value bet, having the confidence recent All-Irelands brings, the youth coming onstream and the best manager of his generation, if not the best ever. A lot depends on their up-and-coming players, of course, but if it’s in them, Mickey Harte will find it.

And Mayo? Well. Tune in tomorrow, friends.