Bannon’s club move to ban ref video reviews
Legan Sarsfields have submitted a motion for consideration to be debated at GAA Congress, whereby inter-county referees will no longer be asked by the Central Competitions Control Committee (CCCC) to examine video footage of incidents in matches they took charge of and decide whether further action needs to be taken.
The motion, which was passed at the Longford county convention before Christmas, stems from the controversy surrounding last August’s All-Ireland SFC semi-final between Cork and Tyrone which was the last intercounty match that Bannon took charge of before retiring.
During the second-half of that game, an incident involving Cork defender John Miskella and Tyrone attacker Brian McGuigan resulted in Miskella being yellow-carded by Bannon.
The GAA’s CCCC subsequently requested Bannon to examine video footage to clarify if the incident had been deal with adequately, yet Bannon declared that a yellow card was the appropriate sanction and no further disciplinary action was taken. The Legan Sarsfields club thus moved to avoid referees being placed in similar awkward positions in future, by bringing a motion to their county convention relating to Rules 147 (d) and (f) of the GAA rulebook.
The motion was overwhelmingly passed with Bannon speaking at convention about the matter.
Longford county board secretary Peter O’Reilly yesterday revealed that the motion was positively supported by delegates and insisted that it was not passed ‘out of sympathy’ for Bannon.
“John Bannon would not be moaning about the fact that the incident got the publicity that it got. John’s take would be that it happened to him on the day and so be it. But his philosophy throughout his career was that the decisions the referee made on the day should be final and left at that.
“Unfortunately that came back to haunt him at the end of his career.
“But there is now a motion being brought forward to avoid a repeat in the future. Legan Sarsfields did a lot of work preparing this motion, but it was in no way passed out of sympathy to John Bannon.
“Any debate that took place was down to delegates looking for clarification about the wording.
“By making this change, it would help referees all over the country. The opinion is that the CCCC have the video evidence available to them, and they can take the decision to re-look at it if they want to. When the referee sends in his report when the match is over, his work should be completed.”
