Injury-time policy just doesn’t add up
The two best teams in the country, the perfect setting, the perfect conditions; just as there was no better place to be alive than in Killarney this past weekend, there should have been nowhere for better sport either.
Instead we came out of Fitzgerald Stadium with a wild sense of frustration.
This column should be about the magnificent football, not just the magnificent achievement, of the Tipperary minors, or how Kerry are now far better positioned than Cork to win this year’s Sam Maguire. Instead we return to a depressing topic, just so someone doesn’t have to be writing about it in 13 years’ time as well.
That’s how long ago it is since the GAA denied Clare their place in the All-Ireland hurling final and ordered they replay Offaly because an insufficient amount of time had been played. No game has been replayed on such grounds since, because hardly any referee has blown up before the 70-minute mark since, but still officials blow up too early and consequently sell almost everyone short: the trailing team, the paying punter, the game itself.
Last Sunday, David Coldrick played six minutes of added time in the second half. That might be more than the customary two or the usual ceiling of four or five, but a closer look shows it was shamefully inadequate.
In the 39th minute, Ciaran Sheehan sustained the knee injury which ended his season while off the ball O’Leary and Kieran Donaghy got entangled in a well-documented incident. It would be two minutes 40 seconds before play resumed.
Two minutes later, Donaghy required treatment after he was fouled over by the sideline which halted the action for a further minute.
In the 48th minute, a leg injury to Paudie Kissane delayed play by over half a minute. After Paul Kerrigan reduced the deficit to six points on 51 minutes, Donaghy went down clutching his head, which delayed the game for a further 90 seconds. Anthony Maher won the subsequent kick-out, and was fouled, prompting the Kerry medical team to run on and offer him treatment which delayed the game for another 40 seconds.
Not long after, Darran O’Sullivan (30 seconds), Pearse O’Neill (40 seconds) and Shane Enright with a leg ailment (80 seconds) all required treatment.
Then in the 66th minute, Alan O’Connor shipped a knock that held up play for 30 seconds, only for him to get back up and create John Miskella’s goal chance. At that point, Kerry were reeling and Cork were rocking but just then Marc Ó Sé went down requiring attention, meaning it would be a full minute rather than the normal half-minute before Brendan Kealy restarted play.
Seconds after Kealy’s kick-out, Miskella and Declan O’Sullivan got tangled up, forcing Miskella to go off and play was held up for a further minute. Then Colm Cooper and Denis O’Sullivan got entangled, a tussle from which Cooper seemed hesitant to disengage from, prompting Martin Carney to laugh in his RTÉ commentary.
“He’s eaten up about a minute and a half there!”
It’s hard to know what Carney found so funny. Coldrick played exactly six minutes added time. By our calculations he should have played at least 13.
But of course he was never going to play that. And Kerry knew that. At half-time I predicted to those around me that Kerry would slow the play down, knowing it would not only stall Cork’s momentum but deny them time the officials would never add on.
Kerry themselves were victims of insufficient playing time in the 2002 and 2005 All-Ireland finals. We’ve lost count of the number of high-profile games in which insufficient amount of added time was played. The 1999 and 2003 All-Ireland finals, the 2006 Mayo-Dublin All-Ireland semi-final; morally those losing teams were as much entitled to a replay as Offaly were in 1998.
In last year’s All-Ireland minor final Tyrone played wonderful football but in the closing moments they were hanging on against a rampant Cork, prompting the Tyrone youngsters to repeatedly feign and exaggerate injury. It worked. The ref only played one minute added time. Tyrone won by a point.
The GAA teaches, encourages, rewards such gamesmanship, something last week’s fractured second half illustrated again.
This year the GAA and media have obsessed about umpires and HawkEye. Instead of spending millions on a gadget like that, it might be a better idea to simply get the fourth official a decent watch and some pen and paper.
Or bring in the International Rules interchange and if a player requires treatment, let him leave the field; let the game go instead of trying to kill it and time.
Recently Kevin Walsh expressed his bafflement about how added time is added up, rightly describing the current process as “a joke”. Walsh played for Ireland in an international sport like basketball. Last Sunday showed Gaelic football, for all its fleeting and potential magnificence, is an amateur sport clearly run by amateurs.
