Is it time to sanction counties who opt to name dummy teams?
When you are involved with coaching or managing a team at senior level in any sport, your chief concern is doing whatever you can to give your players an edge and a better chance of winning.
Think of the level of preparation that goes into inter-county GAA teams in this generation; the diet and nutrition, the strength and conditioning, the coaching, the lifestyle choices… ticking all the boxes to put yourself and your team into a winning position.
With all the pressure to find every possible advantage over the opposition, management teams at the top level have turned team announcements into one of the most disingenuous practices in modern GAA.
There really is no point in continuing the charade any longer.
When was the last time a team selection actually represented a starting side with any great accuracy?
Dublin named their starting team an hour before throw-in last Saturday afternoon and still made three changes before throw-in.
Kerry and Mayo did something similar with three changes of their own before a whistle was blown.
Indeed Kerry have even chosen not to release their list of substitutes for some reason ahead of recent games.
And it’s not just those teams, every county does something similar at some stage to try and keep the opposition guessing right up to the last minute.
Under the new regulations, every competing county must submit their 26-man panel to Croke Park by Thursday morning before the upcoming weekend’s games.
After that point, the whole process would be far more straightforward if one of two alternatives came to pass.
The easiest and most straight forward option is for Croke Park to simply release the squad list of 26 players with a requirement for teams to announce their starting team at least 30 minutes before the throw-in.
Surely that shouldn’t be too much to ask for.
Alternatively, if they want to continue with the team announcements in their current form, they should bring in some sort of penalty for teams continuing to flout the process.
Why not just make it that team announcements must be made by Friday evening, and any subsequent changes to the starting line-up before throw-in reduces the number of substitutions available to managers during the game.
If you make two changes to your starting line-up from the 15 you publish on Friday evening, that drops you down to a maximum of only 4 substitutions for the game.
That kind of a sanction wouldn’t be long putting manners on every manager who feels the need to use smoke and mirrors with every team selection.
And I know its not a huge inconvenience, and there are far more pressing issues on the game and the association as a whole, but I’ve become sick and tired of the complete nonsense that team announcement has become.
Just imagine the young player who has been named to start, but he knows he’s actually not on the first 15, but has been sworn to secrecy.
His friends, family, and community can hardly contain themselves with the pride they feel that one of their own has forged his way into starting a huge championship game for his county.
He’s getting calls and texts congratulating and wishing him good luck, and all the time he knows its a fraud.
Why would any manager do that to a player? Why would any player allow themselves to be put in that position? I don’t know.
And the uncertainty of those team selections takes from the experience for the supporter also.
Everybody loves to get the team news on a Friday evening and start to forensically explore the potential matchups for that weekend. But ‘who will pick up who’, has been replaced with ‘how many of this team will start’.
The time has probably come to either stop the practice entirely and just publish the 26-man squads like the rugby or soccer boys, or else choose door number two and impose a sanction on the number of substitutions for any pre-match changes to the starting team announced during the week. It would be a simple and effective solution.
The other significant issue that really jumped out at me again over the weekend, and its something we discussed a few weeks ago in the
Irish Examiner Sport Podcast
; but there is an urgent need to improve the standard of refereeing in Gaelic football. That’s not to say that the referees are doing a bad job, but they desperately need help.
While it may not be as apparent watching on television, I noted countless occasions in Croke Park last weekend where players from all four teams were manhandling opponents’ miles away from the ball.
You’d imagine a referee should have ample assistance with his team of four umpires, two linesmen, a fourth official and so on.
But, despite what we’ve been led to believe with regard to increased responsibility and communication being shared between the team of officials, we’re not seeing a significant improvement in the overall standard of officiation in these big games. Some of the pulling and dragging that went on off the ball and went unpunished at the weekend was hard to fathom.
Admittedly the referee can’t spot everything when his back is turned, but if the other seven officials can’t see what’s going on and alert him to the situation they may as well have stayed at home watching the golf.
I have been slow to get on the second referee bandwagon because I’ve always felt that with proper communication between the crew of officials already doing games, a better standard would eventually start to emerge.
It hasn’t happened.
Two referees with an open mic covering one half of the pitch each seems like a novel yet logical next step for the association to take to provide some proper support for the beleaguered whistlers.
Would a second set of eyes help to dissuade teams from targeting the opposition’s top attacking talent every time the opportunity presents itself. Michael Murphy got some of it on Sunday. Sean O’Shea got bucket loads of it also.
And what’s the current solution? The referee sees two guys wrestling on the grass and dishes out a yellow card to both players.
In professional sport, there’s a reason why offensive players generally get paid more than defensive players.
The attacking and creative talent are the ones who sell the tickets and get the supporters jumping out of their seats.
Your Cathal McShane, David Clifford, Cillian O’Connor, Mickey Newman, Con O’Callaghan and so on.
In my opinion, a second referee on the field would offer more protection against the dark arts of illegally bludgeoning these guys into submission with constant off the ball intimidation and pawing.
Currently, the umpires and linesmen are either not capable or not willing to deal with the warfare that is occurring before their eyes, so why not explore the option of trialling a few national league games with two referees and see how it works?
Surely it couldn’t be any worse than the current situation.
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