MOSTLY FOOTBALL: When is a press not a press?

Do Gaelic football pundits fully understand what ‘pressing’ the opposition really means, asks MICHAEL HANNON.

At half-time in the Connacht final, Joe Brolly was cranking through the gears on the Sunday Game panel. 

He had his soap box out and was lamenting the system Galway's Kevin Walsh was using. Paddy Tally and Stephen Poacher, the Ulster men coaching Galway and Carlow respectively were name checked for being proponents of the negative style. 

I’d agree with him on Poacher but think that’s a bit unfair on Tally given the length of his coaching career and the different styles he has used with Tyrone, Down, Derry and now Galway. 

Brolly, it seems, has a bone to pick with Tally over the perceived legacy he has left in Derry and if he decides to stereotype you then unfortunately it can stick. 

Kevin Walsh, however, had spoken previously about having a plan A, plan B and a plan C for his Galway side and its becoming apparent with every interview I read or watch that he is quite bemused at how his side are being labeled as so one-dimensional. 

Listening to Joe talk you would be forgiven for thinking that there are only two ways to play Gaelic football: set up in a 1-13-1 formation like a 'group of cowards', or let men be men and go 15 on 15 for the full 70 minutes. With Galway’s second-half response, it's possible that people might start listening to Kevin Walsh even if Colm O’Rourke was slow to give the men on the sideline any credit.

"Galway, once they got rid of their tactics, this old tactic of sitting back, and once they played with a bit of abandon, they showed what quality they have,” O’Rourke said just before the cup was presented to captain Damien Comer. 

So it would seem then all Galway simply had to do was press up on Roscommon and the game was theirs for the taking? So why didn’t they do that earlier and what exactly is this pressing that everyone is talking about these days? 

In fact, Walsh - in his celebratory post-game interview - alluded to the lexicon being bandied about by pundits these days. 

“There’s loads of people talking about pushing up, transitions, and you know they’re lovely phrases. I’m not so sure everyone who puts them out there actually understands them. It sounds good and it makes good reading but its not as easy as just firing out comments like that.” 

Spoken by a man who has his hand on the tiller, and not one just watching the boats race by. It felt like a dig at Brolly and O’Rourke but only Walsh can answer that. Still, it got me wondering if Brolly, O’Rourke, Walsh, Tally, Poacher, or anyone else involved last Sunday had ever heard of a man called Thomas Patrick Gorman, a Canadian of Irish descent. 

Gorman was a sports writer, and editor of the Ottawa Citizen newspaper. He noted across more or less all sports how teams followed a natural impulse when not in possession. They retreated to protect their own goal against an attack. 

What would happen, Gorman wondered, if they did the opposite? What if they surged forward and put such pressure on their opponents that they couldn’t even mount an attack in the first place? 

As luck would have it Gorman was appointed the head coach of the Blackhawks, Chicago's National Hockey League team, in 1933. They were ranked worst in the league the previous season but he was now going to get an opportunity to try out his tactic of surging forward when they lost posession. 

Champions
Under Gorman's coaching they would win the national championship in his first year. Somehow he convinced his team to attack as soon as they lost posession even though some of his players protested. 

If only one guy failed to do his job the entire team would be exposed was the gist of their complaint, or so goes the fabled story. They lost four out of their first five games before the penny dropped - but once it did they were unstoppable. 

Gorman called it forechecking and claimed it was the reason they won the title. He left the team at the end of the season, joined Montreal, taught them how to forecheck and became the first and only coach to win back-to-back championships with different teams. 

The 1950s saw the game of basketball develop numerous different defensive systems heavily influenced by what had happened in hockey. Outside of zonal defences, they came up with variations of a full-court press and a half-court press which allowed teams to out-number the opposition in different areas of the court in order to dispossess them. 

Press was the word they used because of the defensive pressure you applied to the ball handler. That’s where the term pressing originates from even if the word forechecking is still used in some sports, like soccer. That’s right, in Germany they will still use the word forechecking if they want you to press the opposition high up the field, close to their box, but refer to the word press if its to be applied in the midfield or futher back.

Hockey, like basketball, is played on a smaller playing area, with infinite substitutions permitted and thus fitness never became a factor when executing such a tactic but soccer had to wait untill the 1970s before it became vogue. 

Remember what those hockey players said, if only one player didn’t do his job then the whole team would be exposed. It was assumed a soccer pitch was too big to press but the football fitness revolution of the late 1960s saw numerous teams use the press in the 1970s. 

The phrase 'total football', forever linked to the great Dutch side of this period, was seen as a misnomer by their legendary coach Rinus Michels who much preferrred the term 'pressing football' and that alone says everything you need to know about how they played the game. 

Arrigo Saachi in the 1980s had his Milan team utilise a pressing game that was highly destructive on the opposition. Pep Guardiola, Mauricio Pochettino and Jurgen Klopp all use the tactic in soccer in the modern game, but crucially they use it in different ways. 

Not one of those teams press flat out for 90 miuntes because to do so is futile. Like Tommy Gorman's 1933 Blackhawks noted, all it takes is one player not being able to perform his role and the consequences can be devastating.

Idealist Joe
It’s easy to see why Brolly wants two teams to play 15 v 15 because in such a scenario, after five minutes of non-stop action, you can be guaranteed on each posession one person will not be able to perform his role. 

Scores and open football will flow. Entertainment will be high. The swarm defence of the Tyrone forwards in the early 2000s was the best example of a team pressing high up the field but back then the ball was barely in play so you had the energy to execute such a game plan. 

Goalkeepers took anywhere from 30 to 60 seconds to take a kick-out in the 1990s and early noughties. Stephen Cluxton changed all that and these days most will take seven to ten seconds to get the ball back in play. Pressing in today's game is centered on kick-outs, in particular after a free has been hit, but with time I'm sure it will evolve into something else as more teams find ways to do so successfully in open play. 

Remember Joe, Guardiola only had his team press for seven seconds before retreating, not 70 minutes. 

I wasn't surprised to see Kevin Walsh talk about having a plan A, a plan B, and a plan C. Having an ability to change tact mid-game is key in the modern game. 

I also wasn't surprised to see him ridicule the pundits who want teams to play that way for 70 mintues. It's probably not physically feasible. 

As for Thomas Patrick Gorman, that bit surprised me - a sportswriter who invented the tactic of pressing! Who'd have thought it?