Eimear Ryan: Don't fall into trap of thinking ‘edginess’ is what makes a hurler great
Limerick's Gearoid Hegarty is sent off by Fergal Horgan in the Allianz League meeting with Galway.
It is a truth universally acknowledged – at least among true crime afficionados – that eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable. Netflix is full of documentaries about people who were falsely accused and put away for life based on mistaken eyewitness testimony. The author Alice Sebold wrote a bestselling memoir, , about being attacked and raped while a freshman at college; late last year, Anthony Broadwater, the man she mistakenly identified as the perpetrator, was exonerated after serving 16 years in prison.
Why does this happen? Witnesses misremember details; their unconscious biases, or factors like fear, stress or adrenaline, may distort the evidence of their eyes. In addition, our brains crave narrative and are brilliant at bridging the gaps in our memories to make sense of events. Our memories are both fallible and malleable. It can be hard to remind ourselves of this fact: culturally, we put great stock in our powers of perception. I’ll believe it when I see it, says you. Or, when watching a match: Are you blind, ref?! It happened right in front of you!
Yes, this is my annual appeal to give our referees some support in the line of video assistance. It occurs in almost every game now; there’ll be an incident where the action replay clearly contradicts what the officials saw on the ground. Cian Lynch’s unfortunate sending-off in the Fitzgibbon final between NUIG and UL is the most recent example. I watched the incident back a few times, slowing it down, before I fully grasped the sequence of events. This is a luxury that referees don’t have.
The incident reminded me of the famous optical illusion ‘My Wife and My Mother-in-Law’, which depicts the faces of both an old woman and a young woman, depending on where your focus goes. If you keep your eyes on Lynch, his arm makes a quick movement that could be interpreted as an attempt to clip his opponent, Bryan O’Mara. But if you keep your eyes on O’Mara, you see that he kicks Lynch’s hurley, causing the jolt in Lynch’s arm that could – from another viewpoint – be mistaken for a strike. It’s all about perspective. The physics of hurling are complex enough as it is; why aren’t we giving our refs more visual aids?
We want it all, is the thing. We want to allow hurlers to ‘play on the edge’ – even to laud them for it, at times – and reserve the right to criticise refs when they make the wrong calls. This euphemism of ‘playing on the edge’ was cited multiple times the previous weekend when Gearóid Hegarty was sent off in Limerick’s national league clash against Galway. What is this ‘edge’ we’re on about – that liminal space between what’s legal and what you can get away with? Hurling is already a sport that allows for a generous amount of physicality, and Hegarty is already a formidable physical presence without resorting to off-the-ball stuff.
We have a tendency to romanticise the ‘edge’; to excuse it the way we do bad humour in writers. "All the criticism of Gearoid Hegarty is laughable," tweeted Kilkenny legend Richie Power after the game. "Plays the game on the edge and crosses that edge but that’s what makes him so good."
But is that really true? Hegarty is a total hurler; you’d be hard-pressed to find a weakness in his game in terms of skill, athleticism, decision-making, work rate. The occasional lapse in discipline is his Achilles heel. But according to Power – and the few thousand punters who liked his tweet – ‘crossing the edge’ is a feature of Hegarty’s game, not a bug.
We mustn’t fall into the trap of thinking that ‘edginess’ is what makes a hurler great. When Pádraic Maher announced his retirement, most of the clips that people shared on Twitter involved him flattening people. Not the incredible long-range points he scored, the hooks he executed, the balls he plucked from the sky. No, it was the flattenings that we felt moved to celebrate.
It’s this nebulous ‘edge’ that we then expect refs to police without error. Being a referee is an utterly thankless role, so let’s at least give refs a fighting chance of making the correct calls. It won’t be to everyone’s taste, I’m sure. The abolition of water-breaks was, by and large, greeted with relief, so I can’t see there being an appetite for a ref pausing the match to go look at a monitor. But it seems insane that a passive viewer at home has a better overview of events in a match than the person actually tasked with running it.
If we do introduce a video assistance referee, however, maybe we shouldn’t call it VAR: too many negative associations. HawkEye Plus, maybe? The Edge of Reason? The Razor’s Edge?
Enough giving out. All of this brings me to a good refereeing story, because God knows we need one. Cavan referee Maggie Farrelly made history by becoming the first woman to take charge of a national league fixture when she reffed the blustery clash between Leitrim and London last weekend, receiving warm praise for her performance in the aftermath.
She comes across as a shy, humble person just doing her own thing: happy to get to the next stage of her profession, not worrying too much about the cultural or historical implications. But what she’s doing for young women who love the GAA – showing them that the man in the middle need not necessarily be a man, that women can be in this position of authority too – is invaluable.
"The most important thing for me is to give the best performance that I can," she said after the game, showing a keen sense of realism amidst all the goodwill. It’s not easy being a ref; often, you are only as good as your last game. And on top of all that, you’re expected to have eyes in the back of your head.
