Football needed a sharp smack

A case of parallel commissioning in recent weeks: although the World Cup has an impact on Gaelic games, it's safe to say that FIFA probably doesn't worry about what's happening in the world of hurling and football as soccer's global fiesta rattles along towards its climax.

It was therefore co-incidental (I think) that both the soccer world body and Croke Park decided to issue and enforce new guidelines for referees within a few weeks of each other. The effect at France 98 was rather more pronounced, as the refereeing style changed overnight as the liberal dispensations of the opening matches gave way to more drastic interpretations.

In the world of football, such a turnabout would be hard to identify, as the standard of refereeing is so uneven and inconsistent that patterns are almost impossible to recognise.

Behind each directive, presumably, was a desire to tilt the balance in favour of the ball player and against his less scrupulous opponents. Unfortunately for both games, the key issue of discretion has intervened. Its attempted elimination in soccer has made for some strange decisions, whereas its random application has always caused problems in football.

The exercise of discretion has always been an important element in refereeing. Too little can lead to injustice and too much to uncertainty. In football, a referee has limited official discretionary powers, but in the exercise of his powers to control the game, discretion obviously comes into it, de facto if not de jure.

In an interview with the Sunday Times, Pat McEneaney, the experienced Monaghan referee with laissez faire tendencies which for the most part facilitate the smooth running of a game, referred to the difficulty of being able to "differentiate between a deliberate personal foul and a genuine attempt to tackle a fella".

This of course admits an element of judging motives, which is extremely difficult to execute, and creates further problems in that less intuitive referees have only the playing rules to guide them and must enforce them without recourse to discretionary mitigation.

That is a general observation. In the immediate matter of the crackdown on personal fouling, there is much to recommend the thinking behind it. Petty fouling has long been one of football's most disfiguring aspects. It slows down play and hampers creativity. It is routinely used by forwards to stop opponents building from the back.

Dealing rigorously with the phenomenon is a good thing and it is an area where discretion is probably best abandoned, as anything which disrupts the message that three fouls will result in dismissal undermines the whole idea.

There is at the heart of the new rigour a legal anomaly. Rule 5, dealing with aggressive fouls, distinguishes between those which merit sending-off, those which will earn a caution and those which don't earn a caution until the commission is deemed "persistent".

Penalties for the third category include sending off for a "second cautionable foul". So does a player, already booked for persistent fouling, have to commit a foul in the second category before he can get the line? Or does a continuing disregard for the third category offences merit dismissal?

Here it gets metaphysical. How many times does a player have to commit a non-cautionable offence before he is deemed to be persistently offending? And once cautioned, how many further such offences does it take to merit a second booking for persistent fouling and consequent sending-off.

If the authorities want to crack down on personal fouling, it is reasonable to rule that a player already warned and cautioned for such fouls who offends again has done enough to warrant a second rap of persistent fouling and dismissal.

The biggest problem with this clean-up is the demands it places on the referee, who must travel the pitch taking care of usual business while also computing the number of non-cautionable fouls against the name of each player. In this, as in other matters, external help would be worthwhile.

Mechanical tasks such as keeping track of fouls and time-keeping could be easily done by a second official - in radio contact with the referee, according to McEneaney's suggestion in the Sunday Times. This is another example of how technology could be used to make the referee's job easier.

In fairness to the GAA, it has always been open to the use of playback. Disciplinary matters have been accepted as being open to video adjudication for a long time, and there was, famously, a replay of the Laois-Carlow match three years ago on the basis of video evidence showing that Laois' late winning point hadn't crossed the bar. To avoid setting a precedent, the replay was based on Laois' offer to play it again rather than a direction of the Leinster Council - but the nett effect was the same.

With modern technology, there's no reason why cameras can't be used to adjudicate difficult decisions quickly and accurately. At present, it's a lottery, with some outstandingly perceptive decisions - Paddy Collins' call on Colm O'Rourke's first-minute goal in the 1989 Leinster final and McEneaney's umpire in the All-Ireland club semi-final last February who deemed the Erin's Isle goal valid and was vindicated only after a blizzard of negative publicity suggesting that it was a physical impossibility for the ball to have crossed the line - but also some wrong ones.

Some years ago, RTE's goal of the year could be plainly seen as invalid due to over-carrying, but not alone did it receive the accolade, it also went a long way to deciding the Leinster final.

Technology, the administration of refereeing and a reform of the methods of punishment all have a role to play. The current drive against persistent fouling is to be welcomed because it is evidence of a concerted, centralised attempt to eliminate foul play.

Other elements in this would include the central appointment of referees by a national body rather than the current provincial system, albeit with its limited cross-pollination; the establishment of a match-based suspension system applicable to the competition or championship in question (this would lead to players being suspended for maybe two championships, but that would concentrate minds, and anyway, for the purposes of discipline, it's better to err on the side of severity than leniency).

The national referees administrator, Paddy Collins, has indicated that match officials have already been asked to account for their actions in certain matches, and that, again, is good because it leads down the road to one central standard of interpretation and application.

Ironically, hurling has produced more breathtaking decisions this season than football, with Joe Quaid's kicking of Kieran Morrison's prone posterior a prime example. an MacSuibhne's fatwa on Wexford's forwards being the most noticeable. In the long run, however, it's safe to assume that football will benefit more from the smack of democratic centralism being currently administered from Croke Park.