A lot of talk on Gleeson’s ‘roaming role,’ but he’s not the only Waterford forward moving

Niall McIntyre

How could anything possibly go wrong?

It’s called the ‘free-role’ and managers love nothing more than giving it to their best players. Float around the place, get on ball, make hay.

God, it sounds like full-on paradise for a hurler or a Gaelic footballer who can do it all but after a few days in the ‘free-role,’ you quickly realise that these visions of a handy number couldn’t be much further from reality.

Because the opposition, believe it or not, want to keep your best players quiet. So not long after throw-in, a spoiler skips out to say hello and it soon becomes clear that they don’t have a notion of going anywhere near the ball in this game.

They’ll stick in your shorts happy as Larry instead. And because of their physical presence, you’ll struggle to get a sniff of leather as well.

Austin Gleeson is very familiar with the ‘free-role’. The enigma of the Mount Sion gem’s best position loomed large in Derek McGrath’s tenure as Waterford manager from the first ball pucked to the last and that made him an ideal candidate for the supposed promised land.

He went from centre back to centre forward and from midfield to corner forward and the odd day, he was given that roving role too.

One of those days was against Cork in Munster 2017 and spotting the danger, Kieran Kingston sent Colm Spillane to stray no further than an inch from the handle of Gleeson’s hurl. The man-marker supremo did exactly that and barring a couple of moments of individual genius, Gleeson’s usual virtuoso style of domination was curbed.

Spillane didn’t even have to puck a ball.

Here we are, two years on and the debate over Gleeson’s best position still runs riot.

On the back of his destruction of Clare in Walsh Park, Jackie Tyrrell on The Sunday Game talked up Gleeson’s roaming role.

“That’s the challenge he poses once he’s given that roaming role, he plays it with confidence and with freedom as well,” said Tyrrell.

Speaking on The GAA Hour, Colm Parkinson doesn’t agree with this talk of Gleeson being the only roamer in the Waterford forward line.

“I disagreed with League Sunday last night. They were like, ‘just give him a free role, the other team doesn’t know what to do.’ Sure Cork showed last year, they followed him everywhere, and they completely marked him out of the game,” he said.

“If you’re playing a free-role, and a corner back is marking you, it’s a nightmare, he doesn’t care about touching the ball and you don’t get those handy balls because every time a player looks up, they see you being marked. So whenever I was told, you have a free role, but a corner forward followed me out, I’m like, I’m going back in…I thought that analysis was all wrong last night.”

Brian Carroll added that it wasn’t just Gleeson who roamed on Saturday for Waterford, with a distinct rotation policy in operation throughout the forward line.

“My take on that was that all six forwards were moving. The two Bennetts might have stayed inside but Pauric Mahony, Kearney, they were moving everywhere – picking up one of the three positions in that half forward line. One would fall in and one would fall out…I think it was overplayed about this roving role…”