For the most part now, being a half back is more attacking than being a half forward.
When you get to the highest level of the game, when the stakes are higher and the match-ups are right, a half back is likely to see a lot more action in the right places than a half forward will.
The last two Footballer of the Year awards have been won from half back by Jack McCaffrey and Lee Keegan. Three of the last five have been won from there when you add in Donegal’s Karl Lacey in 2012.
Playing on your own 45′ is now the most important position in the game and that isn’t solely because you’re responsible for manning the gates, you’re also the most lethal form of offence.
The half back can do that from the platform of the 45′. He can decide when and where to burst and he can do it with full-on energy and menace and with the whole pitch in front of him. The half forward has to follow that run, and then try to get forward again. He’s doing twice as many runs – if he wants to attack – in the one move and he’s covering whatever other space the controlling manager wants him to.
Back in February, Chrissy McKaigue kicked four points whilst keeping an eye on Diarmuid Connolly too but his comments afterwards were pure class and they summed up what’s being asked of half forwards nowadays.
“When you’re a half forward in Gaelic football now, you have an obligation to defend,” the Derry native said at the time.
“You have an obligation to go back and sometimes that invites the attacking player onto you and sometimes there’s very little you can do because you can be caught tracking someone else.”
This is pure class from McKaigue on Diarmuid Connolly https://t.co/khmqgtlwCL#respect #GAA
— SportsJOE (@SportsJOEdotie) February 14, 2017
In Down, Caolan Mooney is the latest beneficiary of moving further back down the pitch.
The forward-turned-midfielder-turned-defender was absolutely deadly from wing back against Armagh. He scored twice but he was the driving force – quite literally – for a dynamic display from the Mourne men who put to bed 25 years of hurt against their neighbours.
It’s going alright.
“This is my first year being thrown in there but I don’t mind it, I enjoy it,” Mooney said on The GAA Hour.Â
“To be fair, you sort of look at half backs now as more of an attacking forward from deep because of the way Gaelic Football’s gone. But wherever you’re put, you have to get used to it.”
Mooney was so dominant that Armagh’s Mark Shields was eventually moved up to man mark him. Man mark the back.
“I don’t think it’s too often you’ll have a defender being man marked,” the Down man laughed.
“I’ll take that in my stride. He scored 1-1 but his goal, he just got the rub of the green in that it fell his way but fair play to him, he took his goal when that happened.
“But I was on a warpath after it to try and rectify it and I feel like I added some crucial scores when we needed them to get us over the line.
“I did my bit in defence and, in the second half, I don’t think he had a big impact so I was all-round happy enough with my performance.”
That’s the reality of it now though. As Colm Parkinson put it:
“For players with your type of speed and your ability to break, in the modern game it’s pretty much the only position for you really.”
Listen to the full, brilliant interview below from 22:00.
