Cummins calls for more leniency from refs

WEXFORD’S Darren Stamp may feel hurling is becoming ‘a game for sissies’ but a more nuanced dissection of the ancient code emerged in Croke Park yesterday among some of the Tipperary players he faced in Semple Stadium on Sunday.

Speaking amid the same corridors of power which, according to Stamp, are frequented by ‘a crowd of eejits... making up stupid rules’ it was hardly surprising that the All-Ireland champions refrained from echoing such harsh words.

That said, there was some common ground.

Eoin Kelly remarked that there were far more frees in the game than when he started his inter-county career and Brendan Cummins highlighted that there will always be issues between players and administrators.

“The only thing that I would ask from Croke Park is that when a player is being suspended and it is coming up to a big game that they would look a little more lenient on that player,” said the veteran Tipperary netminder.

“They have to realise that players are giving their hearts and souls for this. They are leaving their families, they are leaving everything behind to do gym work for nothing only the pride of wearing the county jersey.”

If there is fault to be apportioned – and the start of the championship habitually sees a disciplinary crackdown and subsequent outcry – then Cummins and Kelly are adamant that it should not be the referees taking all the blame.

“Everybody gets a little bit giddy at the start of the year and that comes down to the assessors as well,” said Cummins. “There is a friend of mine, he is a national referee and I have seen the assessor forms they get back and the pressure they are under. I would rather play in goals for Tipperary any day of the week. It is just nuts.”

It is no coincidence that the last two All-Ireland finals were rated amongst the best games of hurling ever played and yet there were more than a few observers of the belief that the referees those days were too lax in applying the rules to the letter of the law. This being a game played with a stick, at speed and with intensity means that injuries will always be a fact of life, no matter the regulations in place, and Kelly himself is currently nursing a compound fracture finger injury suffered against Offaly. Both Tipp and Kilkenny are nursing a staggering list of casualties and Kelly believes the attrition rate is higher in the modern game as a result of the increased intensity and physicality.

Manager Declan Ryan feels much the same.

“Absolutely,” said the new Tipp boss who retired from playing 10 years ago. “That’s the first thing we commented on there as a management team, the first night we were in was that the physical hits are a lot harder than maybe they were seven or eight years ago. All these guys are very well conditioned, they’re in very good shape, and it’s no wonder that the attrition rate is quite high. It’s a sign that guys are training very hard and that the league was very competitive.”

It wasn’t so long ago that hurling folk derided football for its focus on the physical but the reality now is that the likes of Tipperary and Kilkenny concentrate just as much on bulk and brawn in the first quarter of the year.

Cummins agreed: “It is a very physical game and referees are appreciating that too in the way that they are managing the game. The tug of the jersey seems to be gone out of it. It is more about getting hit a belt of a shoulder and getting body on body. That is the way it is. You see the size of Padraic Maher, you have no business hitting him with a hurley because it will just break and he will go straight through you. You need to be physically strong enough to match these lads and every team is doing that.”

Not quite a game for sissies, then. Not just yet.