Targeting of referees of no service to hurling
We’ll get back to that. What recent days haven’t done is shed much light on the Kilkenny manager’s personality. It can hardly be a surprise that a man who has managed more All-Ireland-winning teams than anyone else is so competitive he criticises anyone who isn’t on the same hymn sheet, surely.
What has disappointed people is the whiff of calculation about the criticism. The media obsession with snap quotes from players and managers at the final whistle is based on a belief that seconds after a game is decided, the participants may speak freely while the blood is up. But by outlining his issues with Kelly the morning after winning the All-Ireland replay, and three weeks after the game Kelly actually refereed, what was Cody trying to achieve?
It served to underline the dislike in Kilkenny for Kelly, if nothing else, when Cody described the Westmeath official’s decision to award a last-second free which might have won the drawn All-Ireland final for Tipperary as “criminal”.
If you missed the remarks: “At the end of the day Tipperary were handed an opportunity with the last puck of the game the last day in the wrong to win the game. They were handed an opportunity by a complete wrong decision.
“We didn’t speak about it the last day but it was criminal what was done the last day. And people can say that I am whingeing and moaning all they like but I am telling the truth here.
“If he had said ‘play on’ I would have said fair enough. I could say maybe it might have been a free for us, I wouldn’t worried about it.
“If the ball broke and they put it over the bar fair enough but you don’t hand a team a free puck and say ‘lads, there you go’. It was like that.”
There was general surprise at those remarks coming from a winning manager, but not with their target. Anyone who saw the Kilkenny supporter shouting abuse at Kelly last summer at the tunnel in Thurles after he’d sent off Henry Shefflin against Cork would realise that.
Unhappiness with officials isn’t restricted to the GAA, of course.
In rugby, Munster players and officials tend to speak with gritted teeth about their satisfaction when French official Romain Poite is appointed to handle their games.
Elsewhere, when Premier League referee Howard Webb retired there was no shortage of photoshopped homages to be found online illustrating his supposed partiality for Manchester United.
In Gaelic football the inclination seems to be to get the retaliation in first in terms of influencing referees rather than complaining afterwards about their performance: ahead of Cork-Mayo this year in the championship we had Cork selector Ronan McCarthy’s observation that Mayo were good at tactical fouling, which drew the ire of the Connacht side’s management.
Then again, a couple of years ago then-Mayo manager James Horan commented on James McQuillan refereeing Dublin training games before McQuillan took charge of a Mayo-Dublin game, while Dublin manager Jim Gavin said last year that his men had to play the referee as well as Mayo... the circle goes round and round.
In the surprise at Cody’s comments about Kelly, though, there was an element of convenient amnesia about another intervention earlier in the summer.
Last June Waterford’s Stephen O’Keeffe raced off his line to block a penalty by Anthony Nash in the Munster championship, and former Clare manager Ger Loughnane defended referee Johnny Ryan’s handling of the situation, offering a wider context to the Tipperary official’s decision.
“Johnny was absolutely right,” Loughnane said on television at the time.
“In fairness he stood his ground. He was under big pressure because it’s widely believed that Johnny was going to referee the replay of the All-Ireland last year, but Cork didn’t want him.
“He stood up to that pressure today and came under pressure again at half-time from the Cork officials... That’s my interpretation of what happened.”
Loughnane’s comments — rejected out of hand by GAA officials at the time, unsurprisingly — showed that Kilkenny aren’t the only county which has an issue with a particular official.
In addition, his support for Ryan was notable at the time, and stands out in sharper relief now with the relative lack of support received by Kelly since last weekend.
The Central Competitions Control Committee is due to meet shortly and is likely to revisit Cody’s comments, but there has been little else in the way of vocal support for the Westmeath man, apart from his own county board.
Kelly confirmed to the Irish Examiner during the week that he intends to continue refereeing at inter-county level into next season, and another senior referee contacted by this writer during the week pointed out that Kelly had been placed in a very difficult position by the comments, particularly if he is appointed to handle a Kilkenny game in 2015.
Given the relatively small number of referees on the senior inter-county panel — just eight — and the possibility that one or more might be unavailable on a given Sunday for various reasons, that seems likely.
There’s a strong sense that this is the last thing the GAA needed after a rocky enough early summer which began with the criticism drawn by the Sky Sports deal and didn’t improve with the Garth Brooks concert fiasco.
The hurling championship served up a terrific drawn final but overall it wasn’t at the level of last year’s excellence
There are precedents in place for sanctions for Cody’s comments — as John Fogarty of this parish pointed out earlier in the week, three years ago Wexford keeper Anthony Masterson escaped a possible eight-week ban for criticising referee Derek Fahy: Masterson wrote an apology to the official.
Whatever about the likelihood of Cody doing the same, Croke Park can hardly be surprised by strong views emerging from Kilkenny on how the game is officiated.
Only last February the Kilkenny manager was advocating the abolition of the red and yellow card system for hurling, lending his support to a suggestion made by his former county team-mate, Eddie Keher.
Keher and another former Kilkenny player Noel Skehan — who had a spell as a Kilkenny selector with Cody — also chipped in earlier this summer with suggestions on the so-called ‘Nash rule’, the taking of penalties and 20m frees, while former Cats defender Eddie O’Connor pleaded before the drawn final to “leave the game run”, as he feared Kelly would “make a mess of the game”.
It’s no surprise that a county at the forefront of a sport would take a keen interest in the game’s rules.
But interventions such as Cody’s last weekend put one in mind of the old sayings about American economics — what was good for General Motors was good for America.
Is what’s good for Kilkenny automatically what’s good for hurling?
