There’s no acceptable cynicism. Let’s black ball the offenders
What they found was that athletes essentially identified three distinct sets of rules: What was actually in the rule book, the officials’ interpretation of those rules, and then the players’ own code. The latter was what truly counted. It was only cheating, unfair, if you violated the players’ code.
In a sport like golf, the three were pretty much consistent. It wasn’t just the rule book or course officials who frowned on someone who replaced a ball a few centimetres closer to the hole. If you violated that rule, you violated the players’ code, even your own conscience. You just didn’t do it.
In team sports, they found the “moral reasoning” was considerably lower, especially in the GAA. At the time something like kicking an opponent on the ground or eye-gouging was viewed as unacceptable in the eyes of fellow players, but holding a forward’s jersey, or a forward pulling down a defender to win a free and fool a ref, was deemed fair enough.
“The referee knows that people are going to try and take an advantage so the onus is more on him,” said one Gaelic footballer who participated in the study. “If you get a chance to steal a few yards or hold someone’s jersey off the ball, you’re going to do it.”
Thirteen years on and that study can seem a bit dated. Sports have moved on and the researchers haven’t stayed still either.
One of them, Dr Tadhg MacIntyre, has also investigated attitudes towards doping and is currently researching the area of match fixing; he and his colleagues in the University of Limerick’s health research institute have teamed up with seven other institutions across Europe, conducting surveys and interviews with referees, players, and coaches with the view of preventing match-fixing and promoting values-driven behaviour in sport.
But he still keeps a close eye on Gaelic Games and has seen that while the sport has admirably reduced and even rooted out certain unsavoury behaviours, it has continued to tolerate and even spawn certain others.
It may not yet have spiralled to the level of base moral reasoning prevalent for so long in professional cycling where doping has been an accepted norm, but it has no reason to feel complacent.
“If we continue down the road where the outcome is the be-all and end-all,” he says, “we could end up where [GAA participants] could decide it is more advantageous to dope or to engage in match fixing and other murky activities. That threat is real. That cliff is there.”
MacIntyre is not being alarmist. He’s been rounded and reasoned.
As he notes, Gaelic Games has made considerable strides in the policing of its game over the last 15 years or so.
In his autobiography Shane Curran detailed brilliantly in a chapter called Crime and Punishment the absolute recklessness that prevailed on the killing fields of Roscommon in the early 1990s.
At the time he was considered one of the best corner-forwards in the county but after the continuous blackguarding he received off-the-ball, he headed off to America in disgust and would only play in goal upon his return. He saw another team-mate give the game up altogether after he had his teeth and jaw broken by an opponent.
In psychological parlance, such acts would be described as examples of ‘hostile’ aggression: where someone would act out of anger or frustration and a desire to see someone hurt or punished. The GAA has made huge strides in reducing the level of hostile aggression.
These days you’re a lot more likely to leave the field with your teeth intact — and not just because you have to wear a mouthguard.
There’s another type of aggression though which the GAA is struggling with — what MacIntyre and his colleagues would term ‘instrumental’ aggression. Here the intention isn’t to maim or even injure an opponent — it’s just to hurt and stop that opponent’s attempt to win. It’s nothing personal, strictly business. Cold-blooded, not hot-headed.
Nowadays a corner-back is a lot less likely to break a corner forward’s jaw — but he’s a lot more likely to engage in trash talking with him. And as the All-Ireland final illustrated, that corner-forward in turn is a lot more inclined to drag down that corner-back in the last minute to defend a narrow lead.
The GAA has made some strides in this regard. The introduction of the black card was an acknowledgement that too much ‘instrumental’ aggression — or ‘cynicism’ as GAA people more widely describe it — was going unpunished. As controversial as it has been and for all the hard cases and wrong calls it has triggered, overall it has been good for the game.
The Sunday Game panel often say they’re sick of reviewing black card incidents but what they forget is that they’ll never get to review all the challenges that DIDN’T happen because of the existence and threat of the black card.
Lee Keegan would not score as often as he does if there was no black card. He’d be hauled down a lot more often instead.
But if the black card is a factor in why this year’s All-Ireland final was probably the best of the last 35 years, the lack of a black ball to go with it is why the last minute of such a spectacle was so unedifying.
This column has been flagging this one for some time. On the eve of the introduction of the black card — and just weeks after another Dublin-Mayo All-Ireland final decided by a point — I wrote: “Teams will gladly take a couple of black cards in the closing minutes, further institutionalising and normalising such fouls.
A player won’t mind missing the closing minutes of a game if his act has made his team more likely to win. He’ll even relish the martyrdom of taking one for the team.
“But what if such deliberate fouls were punished on the scoreboard? Take Kevin McManamon deliberately hauling down Lee Keegan late on in this year’s [2013] All-Ireland final. In 2014 McManamon would most likely commit the same foul again with just minutes to go, even if it meant his team was reduced to 14 men.
But if the ball was brought to a mark 25 metres out from goal, Cillian O’Connor put it over the bar and play resumed with a Mayo free from where Keegan was fouled, he’d be less inclined to commit that foul.”
In other high-scoring sports they essentially have a black ball to go with a black card. In basketball, if you commit an intentional or technical foul, the opponent is awarded with free throws.
Sometimes those fouls are acts of instrumental aggression, daring the opponent to punish such cynicism by making the shot, executing a skill, but at least the opponent gets the chance to punish you with skill. In football, you don’t. And so, in 2017, Ciarán Kilkenny is still doing what Kevin McManamon did in 2013.
It’s not just Dubs. It’s Keegan himself, throwing a GPS at Dean Rock this year, wrestling Diarmuid Connolly to the ground two years ago. It’s supposedly all the top teams.
“I would expect it from anyone who has ambitions of winning an All-Ireland,” Kerry’s Paul Geaney said last week. “Kill or be killed. It is part and parcel of the game.”
But it doesn’t have to be part and parcel of the game. It’s only part and parcel of the game because the GAA’s culture and rules tolerate it.
If it’s the game Geaney and the GAA wants, fair enough, as long as they understand this: If it is all about kill or be killed and win at all costs, then the GAA — from Geaney’s clubfield in Dingle all the way to Croke Park — is not entitled to a single cent from the State.
All Government funding for sport, especially one that claims to be an amateur and community-based one, is working off the premise and assumption that sport is character-building, that it promotes the better values of humanity.
You watch the closing minutes of an NBA game and the spirit it is played in is no different to the closing minutes of an U15 game you’ll see in the Parochial or Oblate Hall tonight.
Stephen Curry will never stoop to throwing a GPS at LeBron James, or James will never resort to stealing Curry’s kicking tee. At what stage do we feel it’s fine for kids playing football — for the club, the community — to haul their opponents down and prevent them from taking a kickout? U14? U16? Minor? In 2021, will we again have to watch Dublin and Mayo men rugby-tackling each other in the closing minutes of another All-Ireland final?
Jarlath Burns and the rules revision committee are making strides to reward skill. The mark worked. The black ball would work too. Football needs more interventions and deterrents like it to shape a higher moral reasoning. Otherwise it’ll just continue to cheat itself.
