Jim Gavin calls for referees to be given time to iron out black card kinks

With storms of criticism threatening to drench the championship's football referees before we've even made it as far as June, Dublin manager Jim Gavin arrived along yesterday armed with a timely umbrella. Despite all 16 grade-one referees having been summoned to an emergency meeting in Croke Park on Wednesday night, Gavin called for them to be given time to iron out some of the kinks involved with the introduction of the black card.

“Change can sometimes be difficult for some people to accept. This is part of our rules and it ain’t going away so we just need to accept that it is a big challenge. But it is one that needs to be met and the National Referees’ Committee chairman has accepted that.

“The standards that they have set themselves, which are very high, haven’t been achieved in some areas. But knowing the individuals involved and their high levels of competence I am sure that they will address it. They are addressing it.”

Gavin was speaking at Dublin’s press morning ahead of their Leinster quarter-final meeting with Laois on Sunday week. Although the most high-profile errors so far have taken place in nationally-televised Ulster Championship matches, Gavin accepts that there is no guarantee mistakes won’t be made at all levels as the championship progresses. But to his mind, it will take patience from all sides to make it work.

‘Easy remark’

“The easy remark is to blame the referee all the time and we are all guilty of that,” he said. “We need to look at it more holistically and say that this rule has been passed and it is part of our game now.

“It is not going away and we need to get rid of whatever frustrations are out there. Managing change can be a difficult task but referees have done a good job of it and I think it will get better. And they have acknowledged that.”

One road Gavin says he wouldn't like to see the GAA go down is the idea, recently championed by James Horan earlier this week, of referees becoming semi-professional. A more feasible – albeit in some ways more radical – solution would be to add an extra referee to proceedings, halving the amount of ground a ref has to cover in a game and thus halving the amount of decisions he has to make. "I think the only professional people in the association should be the administrators. Officials or players, we need to keep that amateur ethos.

‘Top officials’

“But I see we have some of our top officials officiating at some of the games on the sidelines and there is no reason why they can’t step onto the field to assist the referee as a second referee like in [International] Rules. There are lots of experiences there among the top referees from the Rules that two referees work. Anything to share the load for referees has to be welcomed.”

Neither did he accept the suggestion that fear of the black card has forced teams into all-out defence mode and encouraged more and more counties to go with a blanket defence rather than expose defenders to one-on-one situations. As far as Gavin is concerned, blanket defences have more to do with each particular county’s DNA than anything else.

“There are some defensive systems that teams are good at and that they like to employ and they were in before any rules that came in to deal with cynical play. And they will always be in there now, in counties have a particular passion and grá for that.

“Defending is an art and we have seen some really good examples of the art of defending in recent games. It’s as much a challenge for all coaches to defend as it is to attack and different teams and counties have different cultures as how they see the game to be played. We play the way we play. It’s not the right way, it is just the way that Dublin look at it.”