Video reviews needed to keep rules in focus

ON GAELIC GAMESOld mantras about the 'referee dealing with it' and 'leaving it on the field' are inadequate responses to serious indiscipline

WHAT’S IMPORTANT in sport? For players and supporters the honest answer would be winning. Neutral observers would say a decent quality of performance and a close contest. Administrators and match officials would share the neutral view but probably also wish for good behaviour and no controversy.

How important is fairness? The very word “sportsmanship” implies fair and generous behaviour, like in golf calling shots against yourself. Yet why do field-sports participants now appear to operate on the basis anything’s acceptable as long as you can get away with it? It doesn’t take a World Cup to emphasise that soccer players are much given to feigning injury after innocuous challenges and also quite happy to try to get opponents shown yellow and red cards, both by pretence and haranguing the referee to take action.

Rugby players who can stealthily infringe in those unseen areas peculiar to the game and engineer unfair advantage are greatly prized even if (and maybe because) the rules ordain the individuals, who are caught, will spend 10 minutes on the sideline every so often.

Gaelic games have their own issues. Diving has been learned from soccer. Look behind that and ask why. Probably because for every soft free a top forward (across the sports) is awarded he has sustained a barrage of sneaky hits intended to intimidate or inhibit him.

There is more exclusively the refusal to accept legitimate sanction. It would have been entertaining were it not slightly depressing to listen to the recent outpourings about Paul Galvin being suddenly interrupted by the player himself accepting responsibility and declining to ask for even a hearing.

Sadly that’s not the norm. Many suspensions are seen resentfully as outside interference that must be resisted. Referees are relentlessly criticised for perfectly reasonable decisions, sometimes by dismissing their overall performance and also according to the ancient rites of “whataboutery”.

To what lengths is a governing body entitled to go to enforce the concept of sportsmanship? What supervening powers of technological review are appropriate? This is a subject that is causing a lot of debate in soccer as well as in football and hurling.

The World Cup controversies have been noteworthy. My colleague Tom Humphries made an interesting argument against the use of technology in professional soccer, as did the journalist and broadcaster Guillem Balague on RTÉ radio last week – drawing much intemperate disagreement from Eamon Dunphy. There is, however, a simple rigour in the argument that mistakes are mistakes and everyone makes them, including match officials. As long as they are honest mistakes they should be accepted. A referee should be treated like a goalpost and an incorrect decision like an erratic bounce.

As was sometimes overlooked in the clamour for video justice after Thierry Henry’s Hand of Cromwell in Paris, even rugby has limits on how far back the TMO can review a score and its build-up. In other words even if Frank Lampard’s goal against Germany would have been allowed because the ball would have clearly been seen to cross the line, there would have been no disallowing the Carlos Tevez goal against Mexico.

Where rugby is a more appropriate guide is in the incident at the end of playing time in the Ghana-Uruguay quarter-final. The penalty try is a very good deterrent against calculated foul play: break the rules repeatedly to prevent the opposition scoring and the highest potential score (a try under the posts) will be awarded against you. Similarly, to prevent your team from conceding a goal (and in the Ghana case losing) by committing a foul, whether deliberately or instinctively, is wrong and the award of a penalty is too incomplete a sanction even with the dismissal of the offending player. There exists a strong argument that handling on the goal line regardless of the effect should result in an automatic goal.

Because the availability of the technology is comparatively recent, Gaelic games are still finding a way around the issue of video evidence. There is a strong view that the results of matches can’t be changed no matter what video review of ambiguous scores might disclose. The occasional outraged losing reaction aside, that’s a consensus.

The major area of video intervention has been in the field of discipline. So permissive had been the standard of refereeing in the past that red-card offences frequently went unpunished. It’s only 10 years since the GAA started consistently to mobilise video evidence against serious foul play and even then the enforcement hasn’t always been whole-hearted. Stephen Kelly, the Limerick player elbowed by Tomás Sé in Sunday’s Munster football final, gallantly voiced his own wish that Ó Sé not be suspended for the foul. But he will be aware from his career with Shannon that such behaviour isn’t tolerated in rugby. Any red-card offence not punished as such by the referee – including those for which the offending player has been sin-binned – is liable to earn a player suspension.

The old mantras about the “referee dealing with it” and “leaving it on the field” are inadequate responses to serious indiscipline. Nor is this just a matter of referees abdicating responsibility; frequently they just don’t see properly what happens because all of their judgments are delivered in real time.

Given the dislike of rules enforcement within the GAA, there has been a litany of complaints about the Sunday Game becoming a citing body but, the CCCC isn’t in a position to review every minute of recorded action on a given weekend and has openly accepted they accept prompts about incidents and it would be negligent of them not to. Consideration of red-card infractions should be based on the merits of the incident and not how it came to the attention of the CCCC. If sporting chances are supposed to be about the possibility of succeeding as long as you play within certain rules, failure to observe those rules has to be deterred vigorously and improving the likelihood of suspension is the best deterrent.

Fair play, if it isn’t to be a cliché, has to be based on the rules of a game. It’s not unfair on a team that the ball bounces capriciously and an undeserved defeat is sustained. Nor is it unfair that a player with an unblemished disciplinary record is sent off for committing a red-card infraction. But it is unfair and unsporting if a team is disadvantaged by the failure to punish deliberate infringement of the rules by which everyone is supposed to play. A sports organisation has to make use of whatever means at its disposal to prevent that. e-mail: smoran@irishtimes.com