Time to take tough action

There was a touch of nostalgia going around the household last Friday morning as I listened to Mick Byrne talking about events at the Dundalk-Shamrock Rovers match at Oriel Park the previous evening. When I was 12 or 13, I was involved in a similar sort of fiasco and Byrne's account of last week's league game brought the memories flooding back.

The game involved Dalkey United, the club I played for, and the key problem on the day in question was that our opponents had neither arranged a referee nor brought nets. Midway through the second half, with us a goal up, one of our midfielders struck a shot from some 25 yards out which sailed a few feet over the bar. The referee, his father and our manager, gave the goal and the game was effectively killed off. As the whole squad piled into a couple of cars to head home, the local players threw fairly unthreatening missiles at us and, deeply embarrassed even then by what had happened, my sympathies were with them.

That, of course, was underage football (and not of a particularly high level either) - last Thursday's game involved two of the country's leading clubs, organisations with often talked-about ambitious plans for their futures. All of which made Thursday night's events even more embarrassing.

True, matters might have passed off virtually without comment had the game's referee, Damien Hancock, spotted what most of the other people in the ground did, that when Derek Tracey struck a closerange shot with a quarter of an hour to play, the ball beat goalkeeper Steve Williams and rolled into the net.

The referee didn't see it, though. It would be easy to blame him and forget about the whole affair but Hancock - even if his refusal to spend some time investigating the matter more fully before restarting the game was an opportunity lost - has a bit of an out.

Nets are hung on the back of goalposts precisely because they help to avoid this sort of problem. Hancock really should have checked but then if the man claims that he didn't expect the nets at a ground like Oriel Park to have ball-sized holes in them, well, it doesn't exactly bring glory on our game to argue with him.

Now the damage to the league is done. RTE's Pat Kenny Show, not traditionally a close follower of the domestic game, was one of several new media outlets that the League found open to it on Friday morning. Doubtless many of those who say that Irish people should go to see local Premiership football, and that things are improving, will feel let down.

The question remains, however, as to what is to be done about the incident. As it happens a number of senior league officials attended last Thursday's game, there, perhaps, to continue negotiations over the financial assistance which Merrion Square has been giving one of the country's biggest clubs. Given the well known situation at the club on that front and the board's ongoing and, to date, generally impressive attempts to take stock of the position and start to turn it around, imposing a heavy fine hardly seems a useful avenue to go down.

Nor would it be of much use to Shamrock Rovers who could, quite conceivably, miss out on a place in Europe, or worse, on the basis of last Thursday's events. Rovers have said that they will appeal the referee's decision and attempt to have the goal - which even Dundalk goalkeeper Williams admitted was a goal - recognised as such.

This attempt, or any hopes of having the game replayed is doomed to failure, for even if the League here was to side with the Dublin club, FIFA, as they have done in the past, would surely intervene to ensure that the referee's decision continues to be regarded as final.

In fact, there does not appear to be any way in which Rovers can come out of this on top. Awarding the game to the Dubliners seems to be outside the League's powers and so they will simply have to live with the consequences.

Under rule 41 of the League, however, the management committee has fairly wide-ranging powers to deal with Dundalk, and these powers should be exercised over the coming weeks. To deduct points from the club would be hard on Jim McLaughlin and his players but that is the sort of action that has to be taken because there is little point in any of the people involved in the senior game at this level talking about a new spirit of professionalism, as they often do, and then shrugging this sort of buffoonery off as just being "one of those things."

A tough line won't help Rovers much this time around, but at least it will help the rest of us to get our heads out of our hands.