When I played football as a boy and teen I never even knew of a foot block rule or the square ball rule. They just expected you to know the rules, they never actually sat down and told you as a child what the rules of Gaelic football were. The highlight of my career was scoring a goal in Celtic Park in U-14 but it was ruled square ball.
Foot block seems an odd rule given that the game is called foot ball. That would be like not allowing to block with your hands in that European hand ball sport.
It's the risk of danger to the kicker. It's very easy to break a kickers leg by blocking the ball or planting your foot behind a ball. The kicker can shatter the bones in their foot by kicking with power, basically like kicking a concrete block.
The footblock happens without incident in soccer. That Monaghan footblock was harmless.
No it doesn't, we see horrendous injuries in soccer because of it
Can you point to some examples?
Neither of the two foot blocks in the Mayo Monaghan game were remotely dangerous, in fact they were examples of very good last ditch defending which prevented two goal bound shots from hitting the back of the net.
How many times do you see a goalkeeper foot block? Cluxton?
I think it should be up to ref to determine what is a dangerous block, as with a studs up tackle in soccer.
Alan Smith had a bad injury from an attempted block. Heard of others before but he's the one off the top of my head.
The 1st one could have been. You don't need to actually see an injury to say it's dangerous. It's been in the rules here for a while due to bad injuries in the past. My old man had a story years ago of a defender placing his foot behind the ball as the forward was kicking it, and the forward shattered his leg on kicking it, as he was essentially kicking a solid object. This wasn't uncommon in the past, and it's why it was brought in.
Heard a ref during the week clearing it up from his point of view. He calls it a foot block if the block is attempted within the arc of the kickers swing, where you can risk injury to the kicker. So essentially he called it that the 1st incident last weekend was a foot block, the 2nd one wasn't due to the distance away. Think there's no issue with keepers saving it in this case with their feet if it's at distance.