GAA forced to backtrack on Hawk-Eye
Association chiefs had agreed to a two year trial of Hawk-Eye’s score detection technology beginning this weekend.
But the double-header of Leinster championship games involving All-Ireland holders Dublin will come and go without any official monitoring.
It’s a blow to GAA chiefs who have been forced to backtrack on their plans, though Director General Paraic Duffy refused to criticise Hawk-Eye.
He said that it remained a joint aspiration of both the GAA and the score detection specialists to devise a system that works for Gaelic games.
But while he sounded a positive note and insisted more work will take place behind the scenes on Sunday, he couldn’t say for certain if it will actually be introduced this year after all.
“We’re absolutely confident it can work out in time but we hoped to start this weekend and it isn’t ready,” said Duffy, who explained the problems. “One of the problems is that the signal must come back to the referee very quickly and there was a delay in the signal coming back.
“That was one of the key things, the referee was having to wait too long to get confirmation from Hawk-Eye and that’s no use.
“And then there was issues around things like, for example, the goalposts moving in strong winds. We have to be absolutely certain that the adjudication is correct.”
Duffy did report progress in the area of developing a mechanism whereby Hawk-Eye’s decisions can be immediately relayed to TV viewers watching at home.
“Hawk-Eye are very confident we’ll get this all sorted,” said Duffy. “And I think from Sunday it will speed up because we’ll have more games here and you can only test it on live games.”
But Duffy refused to hit out at Hawk-Eye.
“No we wouldn’t be annoyed with them, to be fair to them we decided ourselves that we would work towards bringing this in,” he said. “So there’s no blame to anybody there.”
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