Call time on out-of-touch refs

WHEN, oh when, is the GAA going to do something about the standard of inter-county refereeing?

Let’s not try to be diplomatic here, or understanding, or any of the other nonsense usually used to explain away yet another bad performance by the man in the middle. The standard, in both hurling and football, is abysmal.

I saw two games this weekend in the All-Ireland qualifiers, one hurling, one football. In both games, the referee seemed to be working from his own highly-personalised rule-book.

Football particularly has problems, but hurling refereeing also leaves a lot to be desired.

A few basics before we start. A guy who jabs his hurley into the ground behind a ball, to prevent his opponent from getting a clean swing at it, takes the force of the clash on his stick, and is not committing a foul. A guy who pulls at a throw-in ball, and meets the ankle of an opponent who has decided not to clash, but instead has opted to step across the ball, to try and catch it, should not be penalised.

A player who opts to pull on a high ball, while his opponent decides to try and catch the same ball, his hand unprotected, should not be penalised, not under any rule by which I played anyway.

A player who has position and who stands his ground while his opponent attempts to barge his way through, should not be penalised.

And on and on it goes, I could fill up this whole column with instances of bad refereeing, instances I’ve seen over and over again.

For a couple of those examples above, the safety issue will be quoted, a fella pulling across an opponent’s legs, or his hand. Bullshit. In all sports, not just hurling, there are areas where it’s the player’s responsibility to look after his own safety, not to put himself deliberately in the way of harm. Any hurler worth his salt knows that in the circumstances described above, he is taking a risk, for the gain of getting the ball in hand.

If there is any free to be awarded, and I don’t think there is, then it should be against the player putting himself at risk. On the one hand, you have all these people bemoaning the lack of overhead play anymore, on the other, you have referees who will blow against the guy who pulls on a ball in the air, if some eejit thinks that he’s playing football and tries to make an unprotected catch.

Or what about the referee who, from 50 yards, can decide a player is in the square before a dropping ball? What are his two umpires, who are only yards away, doing? Surely that’s their call.

We’ve just had the farce of the yellow-card sin-bin experiment in the League. None of that would ever have been necessary if the referees had properly implemented the rules that exist. Almost as a whole, they didn’t, many of them actually deciding to follow their own set of rules and guidelines. It is time, surely, for the GAA to address this problem.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been talking to former players, and time and again, the issue of refereeing raises its controversial head.

Eamonn O’Donoghue, former Cork star said: “It’s the one area where the GAA has fallen away behind. The game has become so fast now, so technical, at all levels, that a lot of referees are simply not able to keep up with the pace, and I’m including a lot of inter-county referees in that. All the training and preparation now that goes into getting teams ready, but the refereeing standard hasn’t kept pace.”

What can be done?

A couple of things. First of all, give the linesmen and the assistant referees the authority to alert the man in the middle to foul play. He’s a fully qualified referee after all, make him earn his corn. And speaking of corn, in the midst of the debate about pay-for-play, what about pay-for-referee?

They don’t have to be fully professional, just semi; take a group of the best, train and test them to the highest standards, and let them off. Expense? “Cost should not be a factor, what about the cost of losing an All-Ireland because of an incorrect call by an umpire?” asked Jim Greene, a former Waterford Allstar. He is absolutely right.

Teams are putting in huge effort, at huge expense, yet games can still be decided, and often are, by a bad call from a bad referee. Greene again: “I looked up the book recently, and the rules are in there, for fellas who persistently commit personal fouls. It’s just that the referees are not implementing those rules. What happened with the experimental rules was that they made the situation worse; in basketball you can commit five personal fouls before being sent off, under those rules it was just two, in hurling. That’s ridiculous, in a contact sport.”

Let the GAA stop defending the indefensible, start doing something about it. Referees must not be left off the hook, not any more.