Is Rules trial run being sold short?

In two months' time, the International Rules tour will be departing for Australia. This is the second year of a four-year trial and it is generally accepted that if this doesn't kick-start the concept, the international dimension is dead.

Furthermore October's series will be a vital indicator of the likely future of International Rules. It is essential that the Australian sporting public take to the game more enthusiastically than has been the case with previous tours in 1986 or 1990.

Accordingly, it is a little surprising that the GAA as an institution is approaching the tour in what appears to be an ambivalent fashion. Certainly that is one interpretation of last week's announcement that there is to be a hurling All Stars trip to Boston together with an exhibition match between next month's All-Ireland football finalists.

This trip will overlap with the International Rules tour. Ireland's playing strength won't be affected as those selected from the ranks of the All-Ireland finalists will travel to Australia. But the GAA's top brass (even Frank Murphy) can't be in two places at once so there will be a diffusion of the focus at administrative level.

Whereas everyone can appreciate the substantial achievement of the Boston GAA in completing the Canton facility which is to be formally opened by the exhibition matches, surely there didn't have to be a direct clash with the series Down Under?

The clash has been regretted by GAA president Joe McDonagh, who also undertook to try and avoid a similar situation arising in the future, but the autumn is going to be a particularly delicate time for the international series.

Closer to home is the fact that the All-Ireland football final is scheduled to be replayed - if necessary - on the weekend of the first Test in Australia. Not only does this mean that a draw will turn the front row of the press box into a vale of tears, but that some of the best - and by definition most in-form - players will be missing.

This may be an unfortunate matter of timing which the GAA can do little to remedy but again should it happen, it will lodge further doubts in the minds of the Australians - where enough circumspection already exists.

Last year Australian coach Leigh Matthews said he believed players who had been represented their country would want to do so again. But he again emphasised the fact that October is the AFL's month of rest and that the lure of representative competition would require International Rules to become "ingrained".

Maybe this ingraining will also occur in Ireland and prevent double booking in the calendars of the years ahead.

There would be a sharp irony in this year's football final ending in a draw in the light of all the controversy that has attended the phenomenon of early whistling at matches. The last Sunday in September will be one occasion on which there'll be no prizes for a referee shaving a few minutes off injury-time in order to deliver a draw.

Further irony would be derived from the fact that an independently-controlled clock has been a feature of the International Rules matches.

Last autumn it worked well in the two matches at Croke Park and refuted the notion that the sacred mysteries of time-keeping as currently practised in some way add to the intrigue of Gaelic games. The countdown by the crowd added plenty of atmosphere to the end of matches.

Anyway the keeping secret of the precise amount of injury-time is still compatible with the function of an independent time-keeper.

While not wishing to labour the point there is a postscript to the early whistle in Clare's and Galway's drawn match 10 days ago although most of the salient points relating to this issue have been well made in the past week.

The weekend's (itals) Sunday Independent observed that standard bookies' odds on matches ending in a draw have been cut from 14 to 1 to 8 to 1 - recognition of the trend towards inconclusive outcomes in recent years. To be rigorous about this, it's worth pointing out that a tied match in the hurling championship is still comparatively rare.

Over the last five seasons (including this campaign to date), football matches have proved close to three times more likely to end in draws, although there are only twice as many teams involved.

In that time there have been eight draws in hurling and one re-fixture (after last year's incomplete Clare-Offaly semi-final) whereas in football there have been 23 draws and also one refixture (when Laois granted one to Carlow in 1995).

WHAT'S remarkable about the hurling is the number of times Clare figure in the statistics. In the past two championships, they have drawn four of their six fixtures.

Amongst the commentaries on this state of affairs, most opinions have been ranged against what is seen as the culture of the draw in Gaelic games and how this impacts on referees. Two points occur in this regard.

Firstly, just look at the furious controversies whipped up earlier this season over erroneous refereeing decisions which or may not have affected the outcome of matches. Any mistake can be parsed for its potential to have altered a result. At the time the high-tension, sudden-death environment which contributes to such scalded reactions was mentioned but there is an effect as well as a cause. Part of the effect is to inhibit referees in tight matches.

If a team wins by one point, any mistakes made by the match official are going to be subject to microscopic scrutiny in the week which follows and may even form the basis of a formal objection. Cork's Niall Barrett who was at the epicentre of the season's first major controversy hasn't been given a championship match since.

Allowing that referees shouldn't make mistakes in the first place, who can blame them for not wanting to subject themselves to a flashfire of controversy when a simple decision to whistle up a little early - whereas it also attracts unwelcome attention - will always trigger an idle consensus that the draw "was a fair result".

Chances are, particularly when Clare are playing, that the replay will be a procession and no referee is going to attract much negative publicity in the wake of a totally one-sided match. The weekend proved this once more but it also raised a question mark over the assumption that every draw's a fair result.

In the end it didn't prove particularly equitable for Galway, whose chances of winning the first match in the three minutes which remained were incomparably better - with or without the free which should have been awarded instead of time being prematurely called - than they turned out to be in the replay.