Is the clock ticking on possession football?

Gaelic football is in crisis again. No news here. Crisis is Gaelic football's natural state.

It is easier to list out the eras in which the game was not held to be in crisis. Perhaps for a brief time in the late 90s? After the sport emerged from its Charlton-era funk but before puke football. Maybe during the Cork-Kerry heyday at the turn of the 2010s, before Jim McGuinness arrived with his 'system' and well before Jim Gavin's Dubs destroyed the morale of rural Ireland.

The latest crisis concerns the modern player's willingness to pass the ball sideways and backwards to his unmarked teammates for much longer than the normal human concentration span will currently tolerate.

Roscommon pushed the envelope farther than it had ever been pushed last Sunday and have sparked yet another state-of-the-game debate in the process. You know a tactic has really landed when rule changes are being proposed afterwards. ("Fantastic lads! That worked to a tee. The county secretaty is after telling me out there he's been summoned to an emergency sitting of Congress").

The current anxiety is roughly the opposite of the puke football crisis of 20 years ago. Back then, frenzied swarm tackling reduced the game to an anarchic mess, in which skillful players barely had time to breathe let alone play football. Seamus Moynihan famously remarked that the middle third of the pitch during the 2003 All-Ireland semi-final was like Times Square.

Nowadays, by contrast, average blue-collar defenders have all the time in the world to potter around with the ball, provided they're not inclined to be too ambitious with it.

Aaron Kernan argued on 'Smaller Fish' this week that all that's required to function as an inter-county footballer now is an ability to run and