Dave’s Football Blog

For the first week of this new blog format, we’ll take a look at the six most popular football games on the planet, in no particular order but the one I choose, and give a brief overview of where they come from and where they might be going.

Admit it. Unless you’re from Ireland — or married to an Irish national, like this friendly drunk I met while watching the AFL Grand Final in an Irish Pub in Raleigh last September — you have no clue what this is, do you?

I didn’t, either, until that fateful day last summer when I looked up the world “football” in Wikipedia. I just figured they played soccer and rugby in Ireland like everyone else in Europe — which they do, but those sports don’t capture the Irish imagination quite like the football game of the Gaelic Athletic Association. Gaelic football and hurling are Ireland’s national obsessions. They first played a football game in Ireland called Caid during medieval times, and Caid was legalized in the Statute of Galway all the way back in 1527. The GAA was formed in 1887 to formalize the rules and build upon that old Irish tradition.

It’s worth noting that Gaelic football may be the only major football code left on the planet that is strictly amateur. These footballers play only for the glory of their home county, though even that tradition may give way to 21st century reality soon.

It’s also worth noting that Gaelic football was a direct response to certain “foreign imports” from the United Kingdom…

(More after the jump.)

When soccer and rugby started floating over to the Republic of Ireland in the 1870s, all the cool kids started dropping boring old Caid and flocking to those games instead. In particular, Trinity College in Dublin became rugby central, which helped build Ireland’s successful national rugby team.

One County Clare man, a teacher named Michael Cusack, was rather disheartened by this development. These new football games were just horrible “foreign imports,” and the old Irish traditions would be lost if these games were accepted. With that in mind, he teamed up with Archbishop Thomas Croke to create an organization that was designed to:

1. foster and promote the native Irish pastimes,
2. open athletics to all social classes, and
3. aid in the establishment of hurling and football clubs which would organise matches between counties.

Thus, Gaelic football was born as a way to reject those English imports and create a game that was uniquely Irish. The game itself is fairly simple to follow. Two teams of 15 face off on a rectangular pitch with a spherical ball, and the object is to kick the ball into the opponent’s goal (3 points) or through the opponent’s uprights. (1 point) Interestingly enough, goals are counted separately from points on the scoreboard, so you have to know that a score of 3-7 is 16 points, which beats a score of 2-9, or 15 points. Understanding Gaelic football scores requires some basic math skills. Gaelic footballers’ Wonderlic scores would probably be pretty high.

Players can only run forward with the ball for four steps before they have to bounce it off the turf or kick it, and you can’t bounce the ball twice in a row, but you can kick the ball to yourself if you want. That’s called “soloing.” Contact between players is limited, though if you’re going for the ball, you can get away with a little more contact than you can in soccer.

There are actually lots of similarities between Gaelic football and Australian football, which has sparked many a bar brawl over whether Irishmen created Aussie Rules or Aussies created Gaelic football. Up until last year, the Australians and the Irish would meet up to play something called International Rules Football, which was a hybrid of the two games. After last November’s fracas on the pitch, though, the future of the International Rules series is in doubt — which is a shame, because the hybrid game has the potential to be highly entertaining.

Regardless, the GAA marches on, and Gaelic football lovers eagerly line up to watch “their boys,” who all have day jobs and are well-known in their counties, square off in Dublin’s fantastic Croke Park, the largest sports stadium in Ireland and the home of the Gaelic Games. The All-Ireland Football Final, for all practical purposes, has become the Irish Super Bowl, and the fans there are even more fanatical about their teams, in part because those are their friends and neighbors playing out there for the glory of their home county.

Will that change if the Gaelic Players Assocation turns Gaelic football into a professional sport? Hard to say. Tradition dies hard in Ireland. The GAA spent years preventing the FA of Ireland and the Ireland Rugby Football Union from playing in Croke Park, claiming that they didn’t want “foreign competitors” on the pitch their game built. That changed in 2006, when the GAA allowed limited use of the Croker for 6 Nations rugby and Irish national football club matches through 2008. That has some asking what else might change in the coming decades.

One thing that probably won’t change, though, is the fanaticism that descends on Croke Park every September. Gaelic football may never gain a true foothold outside of Ireland, but it’s still their national football game, and just like other football fans around the world, they do love it so.