It is one of those obscure sporting facts that has resolutely refused to leave my brain, regardless of all the nephews’ birthdays I can’t remember (and happy birthday Fergal, by the way, three days late).
Alessandro Costacurta missed both the 1994 European Cup final, and the 1994 World Cup final, for picking up a second tournament yellow card in a semi-final. Two ‘Roy Keane in Turin’ moments inside three months.
The decision by Fifa and Uefa to ensure that this can’t happen any more, by moving the amnesty for yellow cards to the quarter-final stage, should really be called the Costacurta Rule.
I think of poor ol’ Ally Costacurta, and the way he took such injustice on the chin, every time I see a GAA player appeal a red card or a suspension — no matter how blatant the offence is.
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Because the question no one really asked, as we wrestled last week with the suspensions of two Clare players and one Galway player that were being challenged and eventually over-turned before last Saturday’s All-Ireland quarter-finals, was — did they do something which deserved a red card?
The answer, in all three cases, was yes.
Other sports have issues with officiating. Owen Doyle outlines the problems rugby referees face in these pages every Tuesday. VAR is a never-ending soap opera in the English Premier League, with warring fans convinced that all VAR has conclusively proved is that there is a leaguewide conspiracy to halt <insert your team name here> from winning the title.
[ Owen Doyle: Referee eyes becoming more blind to foul playOpens in new window ]
But at least in those sports, the debate centres on people’s objective interpretation of incidents of foul play. When a decision is made, even a bad one, you can be reasonably sure those decisions are made in good faith, and that if bias is at play, it is at most an unconscious bias.
Whether a player did what he has been accused of, or punished for, is barely even a consideration in the GAA any more. If the referee sends a player off, the appeal will seldom focus on the incident, and more likely will focus on whether the player’s name was spelt correctly in Irish on the referee’s report.
The news that came out on Monday night, explaining the legal reason the suspensions were thrown out in the first place did not in fact stack up, they only added an element of farce to an already ridiculous situation.
The impact that they have on the players involved now seems the likeliest avenue to stop appeal processes from dragging on into the week of big games. The sight of Rory Hayes being whipped off after eight minutes of Clare’s quarter-final win against Wexford might just be the most effective appeal-deterrent the GAA currently has in its armoury.
[ Explainer: Why Clare and Galway hurlers were cleared by CHCOpens in new window ]
Cianan Fahy didn’t make it to half-time in Galway’s win over Cork either, and while the third beneficiary of the GAA’s appeals largesse Peter Duggan did at least last the full game, he was far from his best.
Public sentiment in Clare was far more combustible than it was in Galway last week. Cianan Fahy was bang to rights, and it was obvious even to those watching live on television that he had a case to answer.
However, maybe only a couple of dozen people in the ground in Thurles for the Munster final saw the incidents that led to Duggan and Hayes being investigated.
But once they were shown on the Sunday Game, it became less about what they had done, and more about what else was missed in the game, what incidents were not highlighted on national television, and who was doing the highlighting. It is in those situations that siege mentalities are very easily created.
But that’s not an easy situation to be in the middle of, as a player. I’m not saying that Hayes or Duggan were racked with guilt at the thought of actually being allowed play, but they knew what they did. They knew that for all the anger sloshing around their county, once they cross the white line they have to expect that they’ll be answerable for their actions.
They put themselves in that mess, or at least gave others the chance to highlight it, and they then had an entire county crying foul on their behalf after the fact. A player being taken off after 25 minutes suggests that he was playing badly. A player being taken off after eight minutes suggests that what his manager suspected was going to happen had already started to happen, and seemed inevitable to him.
Maybe Brian Lohan was extraordinarily unfair to Hayes. Or maybe he had a suspicion that all was not well in his build-up — otherwise he would have given Hayes the same chance to play himself into the game that any other player would expect to have been given.
Perhaps that will loom large next time around when an obviously guilty player fancies lodging an appeal. But with two All-Ireland semi-finals coming up, expecting players to channel their inner Costacurta and take it on the chin at this stage of the season looks decidedly unlikely.
