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Clare GAA and Waterford on Sunday. It'll likely be a cagey enough affair until a game of hurling breaks out. Central to the whole affair will be the current bête noire of hurling traditionalists. The Sweeper.
The third high profile game between the two teams in six weeks, it has enough intrigue to keep the pundits going.
We all remember the first league final provoked a bout of introspection tactical analysis usually reserved for football. Cagey stuff, the first half was damned as heralding the death of hurling because both teams used the dreaded S man. The Sweeper.
The sweeper is the seventh defender who plays between the lines and covers space. Traditionally in hurling the no6 fulfilled the role of covering in defence and combined it with a marking job on the opposing 11.
The job of the 11 would be to break the ball on puc outs and try to shift 6 from the central channel. Often 6 was the Man Who Can’t Be Moved as he sat and anchored defence. If the opposing 11 dropped off as an outlet for his team it was the responsibility of another player to pick him up. Great no 6s in recent times were the likes of Brick Walsh and Seanie McMahon. Rocks upon which opposing attacks foundered. It was the best position to play in hurling many said. The 6 got on a lot of ball and was able to launch attacks with his effective distribution. If the opposing team didn’t use possession wisely the No 6 could stand and hoover up ball after ball in his central channel.
As teams started pulling a forward out into midfield to overload that are and win possession, defenders would often hold their position creating a 6v5 in defence. Strictly speaking this isn't a sweeper system, just a spare player. Used properly the spare man could be highly effective. But it requires coaching and intelligence to play it properly. A well-organized attack of five players was able to mark space and they could force the defending team to use a different spare man than they intended by marking tactically and shutting down the designated spare man. Cat and mouse was usually the order of the day in trying to create the spare player to your advantage.
The sweeper system requires a team to bring a seventh defender into the back line. Nowadays, this isn’t done reactively because of what the opposition does for example if they decide to play a sweeper. That would have been the origin of the sweeper in hurling.
Anthony Daly’s Dublin GAA team used seven back effectively. In the current iteration of hurling, teams are setting out to play with an extra man from the get go. So Tadgh de Burca from Waterford is the current stand out sweeper, a sort of hurling Colm Cavanagh, but let us not forget that Clare played an effective sweeper in 2013 when Pat Donnellan patrolled the defence as the free man.
One of the requirements of the system is that the six defenders must mark their players if the opposition plays six forwards to enable the seventh man to go about his business of tidying and sweeping. If the defenders don’t mark it can cause a period of chaos in a team where players don’t know who they are to pick up.
This is why the sweeper is a system that must be coached and refined on the training pitch and in a competitive context. To just throw a man in and say ‘You sweep’ can cause pandemonium if he doesn’t know what to do. Cork GAA were criticized a fortnight ago because their spare man didn’t appear to have the desired effect, it appeared to be an issue of defensive organization, or perhaps they don’t have the players to execute this type of plan. It may have been that the players weren’t comfortable with playing in that way.
In soccer the ‘libero’ or sweeper always had a key role in setting up the attack and taking the ball forward out of defence. Think Beckenbauer in his later years, Baresi at AC Milan, Uli Stielike with West Germany.
Consciously or subconsciously this has influenced gaelic football and now hurling. The idea is that a defensive overload in terms of numbers can help the transition of the sliotar going forward because the spare man comes forward or offloads possession to a man coming at pace. The spare man may also join the attack.
Because there is an overload of numbers, the opposition has to work harder. That spare man allied with decent deliveries into the forward unit is key, as we see from Clare and Waterford. When you have men with the skill of Tony Kelly or the power and movement of Maurice Shanahan the system works. But it requires good delivery, hard working forwards and plenty of movement.
The term ‘transition’ has become the tactical buzzword of the moment. The transition has always been there – simply it is the link between defence and attack, particularly when possession is turned over.
Where Clare and Waterford have caused some angst among traditionalists is their decision to contest the middle third as the main theatre of war. Positions blur into one another as men in defence mark space and cover, to become an outlet for possession going forward, whilst in the middle third more and more rucks develop as teams scrap for possession. It can be an unedifying rolling maul with ground contest after contest before an aimless ball is launched forwards to be mopped up by…. The Sweeper.
Marking space and covering the place where the ball might land is common sense. The modern view is that the game can’t be played according to some outdated view of seven lines of players marking man to man. Even Kilkenny GAA, guardians of the flame of mano e mano hurling have shown signs of shifting in a more tactical route and anyone who thinks Brian Cody tells his lads to go out and hurl away is naïve.
Kilkenny killed space against Cork to neutralize their short puc out and passing game. Just like the evolutions in the past where the ball was taken more to hand, the disappearance of ground hurling and so on, the game will continue to adapt. Whatever tactical innovations emerge this year or next or in ten years, the skills of the game will mean only the strongest hurlers can survive at the highest level. The real interest is when two systems clash, so the late summer battles between a ‘traditional’ Kilkenny and Davy Fitz’s Clare will have the analysts purring.
The Clare and Waterford game promises to be an intriguing affair for now. Especially because the teams know each other so well. Bring it on.