Gaelic football the current Wild West of sport

SIDELINE CUTWHAT THE GAA needed this week was for someone like Yeats to rise from the grave and tell it to them like it is: You have disgraced yourselves again.

Both sides of the coin turned slowly before our eyes last Sunday. Down in Thurles, a notably modest crowd watched as the teams from Cork and Waterford produced a match that slowly grew to a gripping and beautiful crescendo. In Dublin, a match degenerated into something between a pub brawl and a dramatic farce. Some might say that such is the difference between hurling and football.

Well, for all the lamentations and gnashing of teeth about hurling, the old game does a fine job of regulating itself. Hurlers constantly walk a line that demands a high level of aggression checked by an equal level of self-control.

Hurlers are carrying potentially lethal weapons in their hands. In football though, frustrations are always closer to the surface because it is, essentially, a game without rules and a sport in which “shaping up” has always been a vital part of the scene.

Several thoughts arose about referee Martin Sludden’s predicament as he realised that more than one Louth lout was going to take a pot-shot at him: Who would be a referee? Why would you inflict this sort of nonsense upon yourself? Also, where, oh where, were the umpires when their chief official was left high and dry?

Ah, the fabled men in white. It is about time the GAA admitted its fraternity of umpires is – with the honourable exception of the Seanad – the most pointless body in Ireland today. But how magically they disappear! Ever notice you don’t ever notice the umpires leaving the field?

They stand in those white coats which, being honest, evoke something of the psychiatric doctors of old. They wave their flags green and white with movements that betray their persistent doubts and, perhaps, their understandable fear.

But most of the time they stand beside the goalposts in still tribute to Marcel Marceau. And when the game is over, they vanish.

They may well have been putting the sugar in the tea by the time referee Sludden was facing the prospect of having to box his way to the dressingroom. (The thought also occurred that Mr Sludden, a man seasoned in the realpolitik of the Tyrone club scene, would probably have whupped the pick of his challengers had he been forced to raise his dukes).

The GAA has allowed its referees to become the hate figures of Gaelic football. Kids learn quickly and it does not take them long to understand that the man with the whistle is someone to constantly challenge, to spit venom at, to blame their own shortcomings on.

How many managers distract the crowd from the paucity of their tactics or the ineptitude of their teams with gestures of agony on the sideline that convey their displeasure at the referee?

Watch any Kerry-Tyrone match and count how many times the best players in the game bitch about every call. Then watch any game and count how often the referees could whistle for fouls committed.

The phrase “The referee let the game run” means he ignored most of the technical fouls committed. This summer, the illegal handpass has become the collective obsession of the men in black. You can see why they are so attracted to it. It is an easy rule to govern. It is a clean infraction. But the tackle and the number of steps a player can take, where frees should be kicked from, the third man tackle, late hits; all of these fundamentals are so open to interpretation the rule book could probably qualify as a piece of modern art.

The rules of Gaelic football are whatever the man in black decides they are on a given afternoon. If that is the starting point, anarchy can never be far beneath the surface.

There was a separate incident in the football championship at the weekend which was utterly overshadowed by what happened in Croke Park. Both managers and a few players jostled for a few seconds in a flash altercation on the edge of the pitch at the qualifying match between Down and Longford.

Like most Gaelic football rows, it amounted to nothing more threatening than, say, what would have occurred during the slow set in nightclubs such as Julian’s of Midfield circa 1988 when the DJ segued from Foreigner’s I Want to Know What Love Is into Wham’s Careless Whisper: much pawing and groping, a torn garment or two and a furious exchange of hot words that ultimately led to nothing.

On The Sunday Game that night, the guests chuckled about it: “Old friends are best.” “Getting to know each other.” And the row was fairly lame, yet another reminder that most GAA scraps are like hammy re-enactments from The Quiet Man.

But it is the tolerance of these bouts of self-indulgence that create the atmosphere which placed Mr Sludden in a dangerous situation on Sunday and mortified the GAA hierarchy.

The GAA does not know what it wants from Gaelic football. Very rarely can it be classed as a beautiful game. League matches on dry spring days when good teams are fit and willing to let one another play is when it most often escapes its limitations.

But it is stop-start, it is foul-ridden and it has no rules. Grey gods bemoan the lack of kicking skills and disparagingly compare the modern game to basketball. (If the NBA gets wind of this comparison, David Stern will sue).

Gaelic football, much more so than hurling, relies on adrenaline to make the occasion successful. Teams are pumped up to a manic degree which in turn feeds the crowd and their roar must send shivers down the backs of the managers and immediately the officials – the sideline boys, the statuesque umpires and the man with the whistle – feel the tension and the pent-up frustrations of tens of thousands of Irishmen. These men from Monday to Saturday are mild-mannered creatures but on Sunday, in the sanctuary of Clones or Croke Park or Castlebar or Killarney, they can let loose the inner beast.

It could be a good championship match serves as a de facto psychiatric session for the GAA male: they get it all out of their system and go home feeling better about life.

Gaelic football as it stands is the Wild West of sport. It is lawless. It is also full of comical macho posturing. It has too many endurance athletes and not enough pure footballers. (Where are all the little fat guys with the quick feet gone? Or the long-haired anti-heroes who realised too late they should have taken up guitar and so had to make music in a GAH match instead? Why do all up-and-coming Gaelic footballers look like Garda sergeants in waiting?)

The GAA has a choice now. It can decide it likes Gaelic football just fine as it is: the last refuge of shillelagh Ireland. Because it is kind of good fun and it will remain so . . until someone gets killed stone dead.

Or it can show some faith in Gaelic football and in the people who play it and coach it and decide that the game is good enough to deserve proper rules that a referee can govern.

It can decide that the joke is over.