"These teams put 13, 14 men behind the ball and you'd just be hung out to dry"
May 31, 2016
Down manager Eamonn Burns.
©INPHO/Ken Sutton.
Down manager Eamonn Burns says it's no longer practical to play the sort of swashbuckling football that the Mourne County is renowned for.
Burns featured on Down sides that claimed All-Irelands in 1991 and '94 playing traditional attacking football but says going all out on the offensive is no longer feasible:
"You can't do that," he notes in The Irish News. "You can't because these teams put 13, 14 men behind the ball and you'd just be hung out to dry. You have to adapt to the way the game has evolved.
"For a lot of Down people that is a thorn in their side because they like to go and watch attractive football, but it is what it is. Down are always quite flamboyant, they play open, attractive football. The way the new system's set up it makes it difficult for you to do that and you always have to have a defensive plan and rearguard set up to counter-act what's coming at you.
"Most of our forwards are in reasonably good shape, that's not really a department we're lacking in at the minute. In quite a few of those [league] games, we didn't start with Donal O'Hare. We were trying to work on our defensive system more and we got a bit held up with it. But once we got it settled down and we were able to work a lot more on transition and inside-forward play, our scoring tallies started to rise. That's just an area we have to work on and we're working hard at the minute."
