Dublin, during their peak, and Kilcoo during the club championship, survived almost exclusively on short kick-outs. Kilcoo went short with over 90% of their kick-outs against St. Finbarrs and looked the fitter team in extra time. Dublin’s All Ireland final win over Tyrone in 2018 saw them go short on 75% of their kick-outs, with only one Dublin kick-out going past their 65 meter-line. I’m not saying you have to commit 12 players into your own half to secure every kick-out, but it’s about taking the initiative and having the numerical advantage. Having more players back for the short kick-outs also means less work is required from individual players, while working the ball out.
If you’re using the full width of the pitch (i.e. two backs on the touchlines as viable options), with five players in the full-back line, it’s almost impossible for the opposition to compete for possession with the zonal press, even with four opposition forwards committed into the full-back line. If the forwards are forced to cover the full width of the pitch, all you really need is to find one mismatch in speed (i.e. Dean Rock potentially against Sean Powter), with a decent short pass from your keeper into space, and you’re guaranteed possession.
Even with 11/12 players committed to the opposition half, it can be difficult to shut down the short kick-outs. Cork committed 11 players into the Limerick half for a lot of the kick-outs and still couldn’t get close to stopping the short one. More importantly though, look at the amount of space and options the short kickout created for Limerick below. Limerick ended up scoring 1-9 off their own kick-out and it was one of the main reasons they were still in the game.
If opposition are forced to push up with man-on-man marking on opposition kick-outs, then you can take the initiative. This is one of the times you can bring 12 players into your own half to create space for your forward line and find miss-matches. It makes little sense to use an orthodox shape to counter man-on-man marking.
I think you might be overestimating how many potential errors arise from short kick-outs when fatigue kicks in. Cork didn’t score a single point off Limerick’s kick-outs, despite them going short on 23 of their 28 kick-outs, and looking visibly tired at the end of the game.
Also I’m not sure there’s any real sense in hitting X amount of kick-outs long for the sole purpose of variation. By all means, if Dublin have committed 11/12 players into the opposition half, then it makes sense to try and beat the press as you’ve said. But that’s kicking because you’re reacting to real-time shapes, not mixing it up for the sake of mixing it up. I think Martin is probably the best goal-keeper we have available, but we really need to start finding keepers who are capable of waiting until the last second, and who have a repertoire of kick-out types.
