Ideally, all the names would be redacted. For the purposes of this exercise, they don’t matter. The issue here is what constitutes common practice and what is regarded as acceptable practice. In that debate, hurling’s rule book has been reduced to the role of interested observer. Not always consulted.
The Cork v Kilkenny game in Nowlan Park on Sunday is an interesting case study. Though the game was laced with physicality it didn’t generate any controversy. Nobody was up in arms afterwards. As a referee, Thomas Walsh leans towards forgiveness or indulgence. Sometimes, that works.
Over the course of the game Walsh awarded 25 frees, including a black card penalty. Having watched the game twice, there were at least 54 infringements. That is an easy log to compile without a whistle in your mouth and with ready access to pause and rewind.
Even in real time, though, it was clear that some significant stuff was either missed by the match officials or disregarded. At least two flicks on helmets were unpenalised, one of which facilitated a clean catch by John Donnelly and a Kilkenny point.
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Walsh also had a blind spot for flicking at arms and wrists when a player was in possession. That went unpenalised on at least three occasions. Hugh O’Connor was booked for bringing the hurley down on a Kilkenny player’s elbow, and strictly speaking, the Cork player could have walked for that offence. He was replaced shortly afterwards.
The contact zone was ramped up by the wintry conditions too. The rucks were heavily resourced – a phrase you often hear in the game that invented the practice – and the ball was slow to budge. In that setting, nobody is behaving themselves.
But when there are half a dozen players or more hunched like a workman over a manhole, how is a referee supposed to decipher who made the first illegal contact? In those situations, nobody is making a shoulder charge, hip to hip, which is the only physical tackle defined in the rule book. But everybody is doing something to shift somebody else out of the way.
Of the roughly 30 unpenalised infringements in Sunday’s game, none of them are tagged to rucks. Going down that route would be pointless. In hurling the ruck is a modern intersection between common practice and accepted practice. It is not accounted for in the rule book, even though it is one of the key sources of primary possession in the game now. Instead, it is refereed by precedent. Going into a ruck, players know what they can get away with. Referees are just inclined to let them at it.
In hurling, the contact zone has been transformed by how the ball is moved and minded. In the 2010 All-Ireland final there were just 48 attempted stick passes; by 2021, according to data collated by Gaelic Stats, there was an average of 153 stick passes per game. Over the last five years those numbers have not dropped.
Most of the passes are short or mid-range and designed to go to hand. That is where the rules have been left behind. For generations, possession was transacted in hurling by putting the ball into dispute. The original emphasis on hitting the ball as far as possible, as quickly as possible, stretched the pitch. Most contests for the ball were one-on-one duels.
In that environment hooking, blocking and flicking the ball off the hurley were clean and dynamic ways for possession to change hands. Those skills, though, have been marginalised to one degree or another. In Nowlan Park on Sunday there were three clean blocks and a handful of effective hooks. Players are so conditioned to recycle the ball in tight situations now that throwing it up and swinging hard is the last thing on their minds.
In the history of the game, the ball has never spent more time in players’ hands. From that starting point, players are more encouraged than ever to run at opponents and break the tackle. But what kind of tackle are they breaking? It is not a foul to meet an incoming player with an outstretched arm, but it is a foul as soon as that arm makes a holding motion.
Most players will not be stopped by that kind of contact, and because they can usually break through, the referee will ordinarily not blow for a foul. “The tackle that a fella is breaking, is it a legal tackle? Probably not,” says one former intercounty referee.
But in that kind of contact zone the risk for the player in possession is to be accused of charging. When a player is bottled up now, he is invariably penalised for overcarrying, regardless of how he has been manhandled in the maul. Has somebody been dragging at his arm trying to dislodge the ball? Probably. Taking their cue from rugby, “use it or lose it” has become the governing principle in those situations.
That’s not in the rule book either, but it has become accepted practice.
The way the game is played now requires a lot of consent. If players weren’t prepared, or physically conditioned, to absorb hits and carry on the game would descend into anarchy. More than that, players don’t expect full protection from the rules. Fouls now are blended into the sauce of a hot dish.
Nobody would have tolerated 54 frees in Nowlan Park on Sunday. After the game Ben O’Connor was asked what he liked most about the match and he said, “the battle”. Everybody in the ground would have nodded in agreement.
Walsh missed six or eight significant infringements that should have been penalised and with his style of permissive refereeing he is always walking a tightrope. But every hurling referee is under pressure to let stuff go. Nobody wants all of the rules applied, all of the time.
Do the rules need to be updated to reflect how the game is played now? Yes. Will that make much difference to how the rules are applied? That’s a much bigger question.
