ON GAELIC GAMES:Once again congress rejected a crucial motion that would have improved the GAA's disciplinary system, writes SEAN MORAN
AFTER ANOTHER pretty dismal congress, featuring the old favourites of rejecting change with summary abandon, widespread manipulability and inattention to detail, it was the cause of discipline on the playing fields that – again – came off worst.
It's funny how the GAA can rush frantically from one side of the room to the other on the issue of competing sports. When the major competition, rugby and soccer, isn't being resented for inter aliatheir media profile, perceived as overhyped and under-scrutinised compared to Gaelic games, it can get presented as the solution to everything.
“Marketing the games like Sky Sports and the Premiership” became a popular nostrum in the 1990s despite the complete incomparability of a championship run largely on sudden-death formats and a guaranteed schedule of 38 fixtures More recently the application of a rugby-style video referee has come onto the horizon as a solution to the problems of injustice. In fact, rugby’s recourse to this is extremely constrained: was a score actually a score? Was the player in possession in play or out of play and was the ball touched down properly? Technical intervention only intrudes when requested by the referee.
There is certainly no question of the TMO being allowed parity with the other match officials in sorting out difficult decisions. And, one imagines, if the proposal floated by Tipperary at the weekend and withdrawn for reference to the CCCC is taken on board it will be in similarly limited circumstances.
Ironically, one useful way in which rugby could be emulated is in disciplinary matters. But when the opportunity arose on Saturday to do something about this it wasn’t grasped. The use of post-match video review in rugby for the punishment of indiscipline creates a distinct difference between that game and football or hurling.
Succinctly expressed, that difference is that there is a far stronger causal link between misbehaviour and punishment in rugby than in Gaelic games. If you are seen committing a red-card offence in rugby you will almost certainly be suspended and any appeal will likely only relate to the suspension, which to be fair is sometimes inconsistent.
But in Gaelic games there is no such connection. Under a daft rule adopted in 2007 the power of the organising committee to revisit referee’s decisions – accepted by Central Council in 2002 – was parked in favour of the committee having to ask referees to re-evaluate their decisions. This meant that even if patently wrong and inappropriately lenient, such decisions couldn’t be touched unless the match referee agreed and the miscreant walked free.
High-profile cases included Cork footballers Noel O’Leary and John Miskella in All-Ireland semi-finals. Despite obvious red-card offences neither referee, Brian Crowe nor John Bannon, was prepared to revise their yellow cards.
Bannon, an official who had normally been conscientious on foul play, was about to retire but felt sufficiently strongly on the issue to do something about it and his club Legan Sarsfields advanced a motion proposing that the organising committee, the CCCC, should take responsibility for prosecuting charges arising from video evidence.
This would make sense because a) it’s not fair on referees to ask them to go over matches again in the context of publicising their mistakes, and b) there has been no guarantee the officials will actually own up to these mistakes, which in the current national league campaigns has led to rampant inconsistency.
The motion failed.
On Sunday, Bannon gave an illuminating interview on RTÉ 1's Sunday Sport.Commenting on the outcome of the debate he said: "I feel sorry for a football or hurling referee that will get an e-mail from Croke Park on Monday at two o'clock after some major championship game this summer and he's asked to look at an incident – which in most cases means giving a player a red card that will put the player out of a provincial final, an All-Ireland semi-final or a final. It's a huge responsibility to put on one person."
True, but red cards are meant to operate on the basis of what the player has done – not according to how big his next match is. The problem here is this attitude is already to be seen in refereeing decisions in All-Ireland semi-finals – never mind when someone is asked to take a second look.
Then – perhaps even more devastatingly – Bannon added that there was no consistency at committee level either. “Some of them are big into looking at video evidence. Some in the past have never sent out video clips.”
That’s the GAA’s disciplinary problem in a nutshell: many referees reluctant to take hard decisions in big matches and organising committees with fluctuating views on how rigorously foul play should be punished.
Unlike the motions on the experimental playing rules, which never got any real traction, the question of tackling foul and cynical play is something that bothers the GAA. Last year’s congress came very close (177-100) to accepting the raft of new disciplinary measures by the necessary two-thirds majority.
Although you’d have to suspect that president Christy Cooney was including these sorts of measures amongst the items he didn’t want to see raised again during his term of office, the problem won’t be going away – particularly with a disciplinary system that guarantees two things: no uniform fear of being made accountable for breaking the rules and no institutional consistency given the strong chance of changed emphasis every time a new president empanels his CCCC.
- Finally there was terrible news in Leitrim in the past few days with the freak injury that caused the death of Philip McGuinness. The county has suffered similar loss in the past and, whereas it’s customary to say that such terrible events put sport in context, football and the club in Mohill were and remain an important context for Philip and those near to him and one within which his family and friends will be comforted on their tragic loss.
