Seán Fox hoping trial rules will benefit DCU
Seán Fox on the line for DCU. Photo by Piaras Ó Mídheach/Sportsfile
By Paul Keane
Seán Fox has been an interested observer like everyone else so far in the Ryan Cup.
The two-time Sigerson Cup winning manager is in charge of DCU again this season and operating under the suite of experimental rules in the third level league competition.
DCU defeated ATU Galway by 3-24 to 4-8 in Round 2 on Wednesday evening with four-point goals, short kick-outs, the 'back-court' rule and a restriction on hand-passing all impacting on the game.
Fox's personal opinion is that while 'there's no rules that annoy me', he also would have been happy enough to leave things as they were.
That being said, he is keen to make the experiment work to DCU's advantage and explained that the greater emphasis on kicking - only three consecutive hand-passes are permitted - should help his team in the long-term.
"I've no issue with the new rules," said Fox. "We're not going to be using them in the Sigerson but we've adopted them and we actually like the three hand-passes, and then a kick-pass, because our lads are thinking. We want them to progress that way because Sigerson football is fast flowing and we think that with two or three hand-passes, and then a kick-pass, it's only going to make us quicker and better.
"Because we have athletes out there, there's none of them carrying any timber. So I think it's only going to speed up our game which we welcome."
Louth's Tony McDonnell impressed on Wednesday evening and is among DCU's most athletic players. Photo by Stephen Marken/Sportsfile
Aside from restarts, where kicks are mandatory, DCU opted to kick the ball 75 times in the win over ATU Galway. That was still lower than their 116 hand-passes but the 1.5 hand-passes to 1 kick-pass ratio was considerably lower than what prevailed before the trials.
Interestingly, they only passed the ball three times in a row by hand on 12 occasions. The three-pass rule was largely policed by the players themselves with audible warnings coming from colleagues after two or three consecutive hand-passes.
"When we played a challenge with these new rules about four weeks ago, lads were counting it out loud, 'one-two-three, one-two-three'," said Fox. "But then we kind of thought and said, 'stop, stop, you're only alerting the referee and the other team. Let's get a different call, or let's get some other way of doing it, don't be giving information away!' But let's keep counting them in our head, 'pass, pass, pass', and then soon it'll become a natural thing where you almost know it automatically."
At one stage in Wednesday's game, an ATU Galway kick-out turned into a free out that was advanced up the field due to dissent.
"I like the discipline aspect, that if you open your mouth or say anything, the referee has the ball moved up," said Fox, who guided DIT to Sigerson Cup success in 2013 and DCU to the 2025 title. "It cost us tonight because we had a couple of lapses where we got caught. But listen, that's a learning for us and that's a discipline matter, it's strictly down to us. I've no issues with it whatsoever. The games are free-flowing, there's no time for messing anymore."
Former Kerry U20 captain Mike Tansley is DCU's goalkeeper. Photo by Matt Browne/Sportsfile
DCU have former Kerry U-20 goalkeeper Mike Tansley between the sticks for them. The Austin Stacks clubman got 100 percent of his kick-outs away in the first half of the Ryan Cup game and found a yellow jersey with all but two of his second-half restarts. Despite the option of a short kick-out now, to a defender inside the arc, he still opted for medium or long kick-outs the majority of the time.
"The kick-outs, we'll have to go long with those when the Sigerson comes around and that's fine, we're happy with that, we've got two good goalkeepers on the kick-outs," said Fox, explaining why they didn't chase short kick-outs.
"I was involved with taking stats for a couple of teams prior to the 2025 rules and you had to win 80 percent of your kick-outs, the KPI was 80 percent of your kick-outs. But I think this year in inter-county, if you hit 60 percent you were winning, so it was a 60-40 rather than an 80-20 requirement. Which meant that the game was going into different phases quicker. Now the option is there for a short kick-out. I don't know, maybe there was too much pressure there on the kick-out and people felt it was more of a lottery than a team play.
"But look, the rules are there at the moment and we're concentrating on doing the best we can with them. We're happy to move on with them."
