GAA must empower officials so we can truly enjoy games
Imagine instead the result and moment is only declared in a committee room later that week. Your team only learning they’ve been successful in a not dissimilar way a Rob Heffernan learned that he’d won an Olympic medal: by some bureaucratic decree, after the moment has passed and cooled.
In many ways, that’s how GAA process works. Any result, any cup presented, is only provisional, dependent on there not being a cock-up by one of the teams involved – or more particularly, by the relevant match officials and the wider GAA administration. It’s only when the referee report is received and reviewed by a committee that a result can be finally and definitively declared.
Over the last couple of weeks we’ve had two – and possibly three – matches beamed live on television that were null and void.
First up we had Meath and Antrim in the Christy Ring Cup final when the viewer at home and the hurler and supporter there on the day thought Meath had edged it; sure they were even handed the cup and everything.
A week later then thousands of people streamed out of O’Moore Park, Portlaoise, certain Laois’s summer had been revived and that Armagh’s and Kieran McGeeney’s had concluded, only to later learn because of an innocuous error between the Laois management and a county board administrator, the non-vigilance of the matchday fourth official and more particularly the antiquated matchday administration processes of the GAA, that game too was wiped from the record.
Yesterday morning then we woke up to find John Fogarty of this paper reporting that there was bit of a mess in the absorbing Monaghan-Donegal Ulster semi-final replay, when Donegal had more players on the field than they should have had for a brief period in the game.
Little will probably come from it because the match is down for a replay anyway, but what if Conor McManus had missed that late free like virtually every other player in the country would have?
In this day and age, it is a ridiculous state of affairs. All the more so because it’s 14 years on from a similar flurry of incidents.
Back in 2002 I remember writing extensively on this same issue. Na Fianna in Dublin were involved in two games in the space of a year in which they had won on the field and the scoreboard but they’d used a substitute too many. In the first instance they were granted a replay by their gracious, initially defeated, opponents, Sarsfields which they would win. Raheny though would be less generous in the following Dublin county championship because there was so little turnaround time between a county quarter-final replay and the county semi-final.
The same 2002 season also saw Cork almost have to forfeit their Munster football title even though they had beaten Tipperary by 19 points. Kildare were stripped off a league point after they were retrospectively found to have made one sub too many in a drawn game against Sligo.
I wrote at the time the solution was obvious. Empower the fourth official or assign a fifth if necessary, and that official either sanctions or blocks a substitute. If he made an error, so be it: the result still stands.
Like so many things in the GAA though, no one acted, not least because in the GAA no one was in charge. When no one is in charge, no one is responsible. While in another sport a commissioner or high-powered committee would simply have enacted a proposal along the lines of mine, in the GAA it just fell between the cracks.
And so for that failure to act, we have had the farcical scenarios we’ve had this summer all these years later.
Whenever a sporting contest takes place, the various stakeholders enter a contract of sorts. The spectator pays in on the premise that they will see a contest that will have a result. So does the viewer who gives up his or her time. So do the respective players and management teams. The GAA in recent weeks has been negligent of that contract because of a faulty process they didn’t bother to tidy up.
It is not like Laois cheated against Armagh. It is not like they tried to pull a fast one or committed some form of unacceptable unsporting behaviour. Players and mentors can verbally and physically abuse opponents and officials but the result will still stand, yet ask a fourth official if you can make another sub and he says yes, and the game is either forfeited or re-played.
In a way the GAA works more like golf. Recording your list of subs is a bit like marking a scorecard; if there’s an error, it’s on you. But the way it should work is it is on the matchday administration, like it is in other sports.
Take basketball. There is a table of match officials, recording the number of fouls, the score, and enabling substitutions to be made. If you want to make a substitute or call a timeout, it goes through the table.
(In the GAA of course, there’ll be calls about a lack of such manpower for a club junior B game. I was often a one-man scoresheet and timekeeper up in the Parochial Hall in Cork in my time; trust me, the GAA would get round it, just like it does with a shortage of umpires and linesmen).
There is a penalty if you do try to call a timeout too many. In last year’s NBA Eastern Conference finals there was the famous case of the Cleveland Cavaliers assistant coaching staff blocking their then head coach David Blatt calling a timeout in the closing seconds of a tight game against the Chicago Bulls because if the table had seen it, he would have gifted the Bulls two free-throws.
If a football or hurling try to make a substitute too many, maybe punish them with a free in to the opposition. Or just have the fourth or fifth official tell them that they have used their allotted number of substitutes and that is it. But don’t have the game be forfeited or replayed over something so small. Same regarding keeping the score. Whatever whoever is assigned to that role adjudges to be the final score at the end of the contest, that’s the score at the end of the contest.
Let’s hope this winter someone finally takes the initiative. Maybe meets Basketball Ireland’s table officials committee. Empowers the fourth official. Puts a motion through Congress. So we can believe and trust what we’ve just seen and felt.
