Crying foul over Joe’s match comments

Joe Brolly suggests that his obsessive diatribes about Seán Cavanagh are purely down to his wishing to “highlight the issue” and that he sees no point in highlighting similar indiscretions by “weaker” counties.

I wonder. In another of last weekend’s quarter finals, a well-known player from a team that few would describe as “weak” upended two opponents by catching their ankles and tripping them up. He received a yellow card for the second incident; the first incident apparently was unseen by the referee. This is in the exact same category of foul as Cavanagh’s, but not a word out of Joe. Nor had he anything to say about the player in another game who split a man with a deliberate shoulder to the gut.

In reality, if Joe’s motivation was primarily to highlight an issue, logically, his cause would be better served by pointing out that lots of players commit professional fouls in Gaelic games. His relentless focus on one player is wrong and, ironically, utterly cynical. Leaving aside the absurdity of Joe’s seemingly considering every other county bar Tyrone to be “weak”, as a former top-level county player and a media man, Joe knows better than most of us that referees, like jurors, are influenced by what they read in the papers.