AT I sat down to pen this week’s column, I’ve actually had to check myself. Normally I’m quite upbeat about things and take a positive outlook and it’s just dawned on me that my last couple of articles have had a negative slant.

Maybe this realisation was brought on by the fact that I spent 39 minutes on the phone yesterday to a broadband company. I was pressing all sorts of buttons to get to the right department, only for them to tell me what I could’ve told them myself in minute one -we needed an engineer to call out to the house.

Perhaps I’m entering that phase of my life where my tolerance is a little lower, or maybe I am at that stage where I think that when we were young we could have done things a whole lot better.

Anyway, no matter what it is, I’m afraid you’ll have to put up with me for one more rant because this week I got a chance to look over the rules proposed by the Football Review Committee. I have to say my first impressions were ‘wow.’

Like I said in the past, I’ve tried to stand up for a game as much as possible, but I think it’s just time to admit that our game is actually in the gutter.

I do not blame any individual or any team in particular because it has got to the stage now where all teams and all coaches are just playing copycat and the result is the absolute mess that we have before us on a Sunday at pitches all over the country.

I attended another club championship game here in Donegal last weekend. To say that it was a poor game would actually be paying it a compliment.

Before I go on, I’d just like to say that I get all of the stats and the possession-based stats and the set up to counteract the set up, blah blah blah…

The time has come to blow this carry on apart and Jim Gavin is the man to do this. For anyone who has yet to see the full document, I urge you to go and read it because I guarantee you just like me you will be super excited if even a quarter of these rules make it through.

We knew that when Jim Gavin was appointed and with the types of characters he surrounded himself with on the committee, then any rule they brought forward for a proposal would be all about outsmarting and outwitting the negative type coaches that currently exist in our games.

These new rule changes leave no option, but to return to coaching proper football and what I mean by that in simplistic terms is that you will now have to produce forwards who can win their own ball, forwards who can score, players who can kick pass, defenders who can actually defend in one-on-one situations.

These new rules, if implemented, will change the whole landscape of how players are coached and for me that’s a blessing from above.

I am a little more upbeat this morning even after wasting an nearly hour of my day yesterday on the phone as I know I’ll only have to endure a few more weeks of this torture we see on our pitches because there is only one man with a plan and I can’t wait to see him coming.