GAA: On Gaelic Games:The litany of errors in the determination of scores has been long and embarrassing. Yet, what does the GAA want to do about the issue?
FIRST OF all, a caveat – we are in the season of instant enthusiasms. Twelve months ago the provincial championships were being consigned to the slag heap. None of the eight finalists had made it past the next round and, for the first time, all four All-Ireland semi-finalists had come through the qualifiers.
So, had the system reached a tipping point at which the provincial championships could be definitively deemed obsolete? After all, as well as being able to analyse the priceless autopsies of defeat, those counties in the qualifiers have the great advantage of regular matches. As long as a team can avoid injuries that’s the best way to be ticking over. No time for destabilising introspection and also the incrementally developing confidence of winning.
To be entirely fair, a competition should make the same demands on all teams. Any deviation from that creates disparities in the way counties are treated. This has long been a criticism of the championship system based on provinces of different size and competitive depth.
But the benefits conferred by getting out of the provincial championships now looked as if they had become disproportionate.
A year on and it was all an over-reaction. To date, the provincial champions are three from three in this year’s quarter-finals and a 50-50 shot (better than that, according to the bookies) to make it four on Saturday when Dublin take on Tyrone.
Strangely, that would make it the first time since the qualifiers were introduced 10 years ago that all four provincial champions have made the semi-finals. As it stands, this year will be only the third time three unbeaten counties have made it to the last four.
In summary, it would have been jumping to conclusions to deduce from 2010 that the provincial championships were becoming less important, or that the champions were excessively disadvantaged by the system.
The qualifier route has all of the advantages mentioned above, but it also has a downside.
The introduction of extra-time at the quarter-final stage means that any team which has been active in successive weeks – Kildare were playing on a fourth successive Saturday and a fifth weekend in six – can find itself in difficulties against a team that has rested for a couple of weeks.
Kildare will, of course, have other misgivings about the season that ended so traumatically for them last Saturday.
Both of their defeats have come in the final seconds of matches and both have been beset by controversy. They aren’t alone; the litany of errors made in relation to the determination of scores has been long and embarrassing.
Yet, aside from not wanting to be on the receiving end of such a mistaken call, what does the GAA want to do about the problem?
Do the members in their clubs and counties have a specific idea of what solution should be implemented?
This month the GAA’s Management Committee can have quite an influence on the issue. They will be discussing whether to proceed with the Hawk-Eye score detection system, which was trialled at Croke Park during the National Leagues, and, if so, at which venues.
There will be a case made for installing the equipment in Croke Park as a sustained pilot project for a year or two – although that would risk the anger of counties affected by mistaken decisions at other grounds around the country.
More significantly, there needs to be a realisation that score detection won’t help with the rash of square-ball controversies. This provision continues to cause more trouble than it’s worth.
Goalkeepers might well feel unfairly menaced by the rule being abolished, but even the reasonable compromise, trialled in the 2010 leagues, that a player couldn’t be in the square before the ball is kicked (rather than before the ball arrives) was summarily dismissed at congress last year.
We would be a further four years waiting for a remedy had the GAA not wisely decided to do away with the five-year moratorium on playing rules changes, and implement the proposal of the 2002 Strategic Review Committee that a standing committee on the rules be appointed to bring forward urgently required changes.
That committee will be ratified at this month’s Management Committee meeting, and its first task should be to look at a rule that this week was described as essentially unworkable by both the chair of the national referees’ committee, Michael Curley, and by one of the top hurling referees, Barry Kelly.
On Saturday, it was clear on video review that David Coldrick had made a mistake in ruling out Tomás O’Connor’s apparent goal for Kildare against Donegal.
Otherwise, Coldrick had a good match.
In the situation that arose, he and his umpires were presumably looking at Johnny Doyle’s shot curling towards the posts. To adjudicate perfectly accurately on whether O’Connor was in the square, the officials would have had to be looking straight ahead as well as up in the air.
It could also be suggested, in the light of all this, that the GAA would be better off embracing the concept of video adjudication, the TMO as used in rugby. It would be available for consultation by the referee in the case of hard calls. Providing a booth for viewing and a television also seems a bit cheaper than installing a system, Hawk-Eye, which can’t help in reaching a determination on square balls or incidents such as the Louth-Meath fiasco.
It wouldn’t be as accurate as Hawk-Eye in the matter of score detection, but it would establish more of a consensus surrounding the awarding of scores.
There is the lingering hostility within the GAA at decision-making level to importing measures from other sports – ideas that smack of a foreign code, in the words of the old fatwa – to say nothing of the raft of rule changes it would require.
But the irony is that video review is used all the time by the television companies, which broadcast Gaelic games, to criticise officials.
Maybe it’s time to consider using it more constructively – which at this stage is hardly an over-reaction.
