The press is not a tactic any more. It is the default. Ten years ago a hard squeeze on the restart was something a county team did for ten minutes of a second half; now you'll meet it in a junior league game on a wet Wednesday, because it is cheap to coach and it wins turnovers in the one part of the pitch where a turnover is nearly a score. If your restart plan is “kick it long and hope”, you are handing a reasonably organised team four or five possessions a half, inside your own 45.
What the press is actually doing
A good press is three things happening at once, and it is worth naming them separately because you break it by attacking one of the three, not all of them.
- Man-marking the short options. Two, three and four are picked up tight, usually on the inside shoulder so the marker is between the player and the goal. The aim isn't to win the ball — it's to make the keeper hesitate.
- Squeezing the middle third. Everyone else pushes up 15–20 metres past where they'd normally stand, so the “safe” 45-metre kick now lands in a crowd rather than in space.
- Leaving one exit open on purpose. This is the part coaches miss. A well-drilled press doesn't close everything; it closes everything except the kick they want you to take — usually a long diagonal to your weaker wing, where they have a spare man and their best fielder already goalside.
So the honest first question isn't “what's our kickout play?” It's which exit are they leaving open, and do we want it? Send a selector to stand behind the goal for the first ten minutes with one job: tell me where the free man is. Everything below is a way of taking a different exit than the one you're being offered.
Four structures that break it
1. The split — stretch the press before you kick
Corner backs go wide and deep, right to the corners of the 20-metre line, and the two midfielders pull in opposite directions so neither presser can cover both. You are not trying to create a free man; you are trying to create distance between the marker and the ball so a decent keeper can put it into the space the marker has to run back into. The kick is flat, hard, to the outside shoulder — never floated.
The coaching point that makes or breaks it: the receiver must move late. If your corner back sets off two seconds before the keeper is ready, the marker resets and you are back where you started. Late, hard, one direction only.
2. The third-man run
Two players occupy the pressers by standing still in obvious positions; a third — a half forward or a wing back — starts fifteen metres further out and runs across the face of the kick at pace. Because he starts outside the press, nobody has picked him up, and by the time somebody does he is already moving with the ball. This is the structure that beats a very aggressive press, precisely because the more men they commit high, the more space the runner has behind them.
The risk is real and worth saying out loud: if the runner is read, the turnover is in front of your full-back line with your half backs facing the wrong way. Call it once, early, when you still have room to concede a score and learn something.
3. Overload one side, then switch
Push four bodies into the right channel — obviously, theatrically, so the press shifts with them. Then the keeper goes left, over the top, to a single player who has held his width and done nothing at all for eight seconds. Nine times out of ten the space is there, because a press is fundamentally a shifting block and blocks are slow to come back the other way.
It works in hurling too. A puckout to the same wing three times, then the fourth over the far side, isn't sophisticated — it just works, because their half back line has spent eight minutes learning a pattern you invented for them.
4. Long, but to a contest you've chosen
Long is not a failure. Long and unplanned is a failure. If you're going long, pick the contest: your best fielder, on their smallest defender, with two runners arriving on his left and right shoulder for the break. The metric to judge it on is not catches — it's second balls won. A 40% catch rate with the break hoovered up is a better restart than a 70% catch rate into a crowd with nobody around.
Get it out of your head and onto a pitch
Here is the part that costs teams more than the tactics do. You explain the split kickout in the dressing room using your hands. Eight players understand it, four think they do, and three are thinking about work. On Sunday the keeper looks up, sees two players in the wrong place, and kicks it long anyway. Players don't learn shape from words — they learn it from seeing where they stand relative to everyone else. So:
- Draw the starting shape on a properly marked pitch, with your real panel — actual names and numbers, not generic dots. Players find themselves on the picture in about a second when the number is theirs.
- Add the movement as frames. Frame one is the set-up. Frame two is the late run. Frame three is where the ball lands and where the support is. Three frames is nearly always enough; if you need six, the play is too complicated for a club panel.
- Play it back as an animation and watch it yourself first. Half the time you'll spot that your own structure leaves a player standing in the exact spot the ball is being kicked to.
- Send it to the group. An animated clip in the team WhatsApp on Thursday night, watched twice on a phone, does more than ten minutes of a cold Tuesday session.
You can do the drawing part for nothing: the free FullPanel matchday tools include a team-sheet and tactics board — a real GAA pitch, football or hurling, your own panel dragged into position, drawing tools for runs and arrows, and a PNG you can drop straight into the group chat. No account, works in a phone browser.
Inside FullPanel itself the same board adds the frames timeline: you build the move frame by frame, hit Play to tween it, and export it as an animated clip (GIF) or share it to your players' own app. That, along with per-player match stats and your drill library, is what the Coach plan covers — €6 a month, billed to you, no club committee involved.
Judge it on Monday, not on the sideline
Kickouts feel worse than they are when one goes wrong late. Count them instead. For each restart, one line: won or lost, short or long, which side. Twenty-five restarts in a match, and a pattern falls out — usually something like “we win 80% of our short ones and 30% of the longs, and we went long fourteen times”. That is a coaching decision you can act on, and it takes a selector with a notes app to gather.
One caution: that pattern is about your structure, not your keeper. A keeper who thinks he's being marked out of it starts kicking safe — exactly what the press was designed to make him do. Review it as a team problem, with the drawing on screen.