Donaghy urges video reviews

GAA chiefs should forget Hawk-Eye and take a leaf out of basketball’s book, according to Kieran Donaghy.

The towering Kerry talisman believes it’s high time Croke Park bosses took revolutionary action to ensure referees get the big calls correct in games.

GAA officials have been privately considering the merits of Hawk-Eye’s goal-line technology for several months, putting the apparatus on trial for a double header of Croke Park games during the Allianz Leagues.

However, Donaghy, an accomplished basketball player, reckons his ‘other’ sport has come up with the ideal mechanism for solving the various dilemmas that arise for referees in the course of a game.

“I’m watching a lot of the NBA play-offs now at the moment,” said Donaghy. “They have a thing that when it gets into the last two minutes of the final quarter they can review any play, so the refs review it, not coaches or players or anybody else. If the refs aren’t sure, which happens in a lot of sports, rather than just guess, they look at the tape and say ‘no actually, that was a wrong call’. I love the way they’re not down about making a mistake. It happens in the blink of an eye and they move on.

“I think it’s brilliant. They go to an ad (on TV) or they just show you the slow motion pictures. They’re making the right call. You never see the players go over and give out because they know that they’re looking at it from six different angles. If a (GAA) ref could go to an umpire or linesman and say, ‘listen, let’s look at what actually happened here’, I don’t think anybody would mind. It would be a delay for 30 seconds.

“For the amount of time we spend giving out about wrong calls, you’d have it sorted there and then.”

Despite his concerns of a repeat of last year’s Leinster final saga, or the square ball controversy in the All-Ireland semi-final between Down and Kildare, Donaghy is generally upbeat about the Championship which begins for Kerry on Sunday. They host Tipperary in Killarney and, for Donaghy, the desire to atone for missing out on the latter stages of last year’s campaign for the first time in his career is strong.

“It just makes you look forward to the year ahead,” continued the 2006 Footballer of the Year. “You don’t take it for granted (getting to All-Ireland finals) but we got so used to the routine. Six finals in a row.

“It’s quarter-final, go training, get ready for semi-final, year after year. We just got into a rhythm.

“Then all of a sudden, there was no more training. You didn’t think leaving Killarney on the Thursday night that it was going to be the last time you would be there with your friends and team mates for that year.

“It hits you hard two or three days after when you’re thinking, ‘this is over, we’re going to be watching the rest of the Championship rather than being involved’. It gives you hunger. That hunger comes with the pain of defeat. When you lose a final, or don’t get to one, you always feel that you’re stronger and hungrier for the next year.”

The long-term injury knee injury suffered by David Moran means that Kerry are once again at a loss around midfield. Depending on how things fare against Tipp this weekend Donaghy could be asked to return to his original posting.

“The middle of the field is the most important area for us this year,” he accepted. “It’s an area we’re working on very hard in training. We’ve great guys like Bryan Sheehan, Anthony Maher, Seamus Scanlon, Mike Quirke. Training over the last few weeks has been very intense.”

Approaching the Tipp encounter, Donaghy believes that Kerry are in good shape away from midfield having uncovered genuine Championship talent in the form of young defender Jonathan Lyne while, up front, Colm Cooper is relishing the captaincy and apparently at the peak of his powers.

“I would put his form down to Colm just being Colm,” said Donaghy of his forward colleague. “He’s the kind of guy that could easily go out and do it in every game if he wanted to.

“But he’s the ultimate team player and I think that’s what makes him such a good captain.”