Sideline Cut: The sound of Seán Boylan complaining so fervently after last Sunday's sin bin smorgasbord in Portlaoise must have been sweet music to the ears of many GAA people. At last, the Meath men had got their comeuppance. The rules had bitten back.
Plenty of teams over the years walked away from championship games against the Royal County complaining they had been mugged in broad daylight. And the allegation that the greatness that Meath teams exhibited under Boylan over the last quarter of a century had its origins in brute force is something Royal County citizens see as bitter and begrudging envy from counties that did not know how to win games.
But people taking pleasure in Boylan's genuine annoyance - it was odd to hear such emotion in early January - forget one thing. Traditionally, Meath never bitch in defeat. Boylan, in particular, has the losing epitaph down to a gracious homily. What we heard last weekend was not the exasperation of the ultimate fox out-foxed but of a man who has left bewildered by the contemporary interpretation of a game in which he has been at the cutting edge in recent years.
Meath's antipathy to the experimental sin bin rules is probably a good enough reason for many followers to wish them well. Yet love Meath or hate them, they have been a charismatic force over the last two decades and their voracious and intimidating appetite for hard-core football has been the one thing that has preserved the county's traditional sensibility through its dispiriting transition to a commuter belt. Football is important in Meath and tampering with the old principles of the game was greeted as an outrage.
Adopting the sin bin has been a radical and bold step taken by the GAA to try and make the games - Gaelic football in particular - more attractive and flowing and free from the frustrations that lead to actual violence. The profound emphasis placed on athleticism over the past decade has meant the game is played at greater velocity and physical confrontations are often of shuddering intensity.
When all is said and done about last year's football season, the image that stays in the mind is not of the Gooch or Westmeath but of Mickey Linden sitting dazed on the damp grass in Newbridge, Co Down after a challenge from Crossmaglen's Francie Bellew. Although the incident was enough to make people wince, arguments raged for days afterwards on whether what happened was a foul or a shining example of sharp, scrupulous and aggressive defending, perhaps unpalatable but law-abiding.
In a way, it was a perfect example of the dilemma of those responsible for directing the future pattern of the game. Linden was one of the great attacking artists of the Down and Ulster football renaissance, a joy to behold. Bellew has been perhaps the revelation of Joe Kernan's marvellous Armagh era, a previously unheralded defender who has smothered two season's worth of gilded attackers through his strength, perseverance and tremendous reading of the angles. Bellew is smart and humble and not easily fazed and is the kind of footballer who quickly becomes a source of agitation for opposing fans. He has also probably been Crossmaglen's best player in their successful Ulster championship run.
In a way, Bellew was incidental to the felling of Linden. The reason many people found the image so disheartening was that it was as though Linden had been betrayed - whacked - by the game he graced for so long. Confused, blood on his face, busted teeth, he refused help as he walked off the field in that Ulster final. But it was a hell of send-off after 15 years at the top. It led to the thought that the Linden of a decade ago would have been ghosted through the full-blooded challenge from Bellew, would have danced away from it with full seconds to spare. It led to the thought that the game's rewards are seldom and fleeting and if they come your way - as they have for both Linden and Bellew - best enjoy it while you can.
But the thing is, much contact that occurs in Gaelic football pushes against and questions the border of acceptability. Last year's court case between Linden's old accomplice James McCartan and the young Westmeath player Kenny Larkin suggested that the era of silently taking the good, the bad and the ugly had passed. Many observers have argued that the spoiling contact, the third man-tackle, the dragging of jerseys must be eliminated before it kills the skill and excitement that gives Gaelic football its class, prevents it from descending into the mere doggerel that the hurling snobs dismiss it as.
The logic of the sin bin is that once players learn that such fouling will land them there, the foul count in games will decrease dramatically and thus, flair and imagination will flourish. Nonetheless, there is still something fundamentally wrong with the innovation. The sin bin makes a shambles of all sports with the exception of ice hockey. The complaint here is not that it could lead to a parade of lads towards the sideline at Gaelic matches. Indeed, it as amusing to consider what will happen, given Meath's fortunes, when the Ulster cousins get stuck into one another in the rain-lashed days of mid-March. One imagines the closing minutes of a typically ferocious derby played out with only the opposing goalkeepers left on the field.
But the problem with the sin bin is that it destroys the natural evolution of a contest. Sending a player off leaves everyone concerned clear as to the state of play for the remainder of the contest. Gaelic football, in particular, seems to lend the depleted team a perverse and desperate advantage. But the sin bin - and you see it all the time in rugby - becomes a kind of irritating side show. There is the sense that the sudden removal of a player and his abrupt return has a disorientating affect on the game.
One can see why the rule makers in the GAA were drawn to adopting this punishment. But it seems here the first thing that must be done to improve discipline in Gaelic games is not to implement a more punitive system but to change, from underage level up, the culture of respect for the referee. Be certain that many of the lads directed towards the bin of shame this weekend will respond with a few choice words for the man brandishing yellow.
Rather than borrow rugby union's use of the sin bin, maybe the GAA should concentrate on emulating the absolute and unquestioned role of authority that referees in that game enjoy. The treatment of referees in Gaelic games is wild. Virtually every decision is met with a complaint or a torrent of abuse. Teams and managers habitually engage in bullying referees. And we all know that many spectators, mild men and women for six days of the week, wilfully abandon themselves to rhapsodies of absurd hatred against referees, often moved to tears of frustration and rage by the mere sight of the referee calling the game as he sees it.
Encouraging the GAA community to essentially refrain from calling the referee a b****x every two minutes would be a tough thing to implement. Perhaps it would be impossible. As GK Chesterton once quipped, "And if ever ye ride in Ireland/The jest may yet be said:/There is the land of broken hearts/And the land of broken heads." The fear is that far from calming matters, the repeat of the sort of sin bin orgy that visited Meath last week could have an incendiary affect on a game of real consequence. And regardless of the diminishing number of fouls, it might spoil more good contests than it creates. But whether the sin bin is just a passing GAA flirtation or comes to have a lasting effect on the shape of Gaelic games, you can rest assured of one thing. It won't dampen the Meath spirit, at least not for long. They will bin and be damned. And then they will come right back at you.
