Joyce: Black card not the answer to cynicism
Padraic Joyce won two All-Irelands with Galway, in 1998 and 2001, but the inter-county game he entered in 1997 was a very different environment to the one he left last year after such a distinguished career.
“It is totally different,” he agreed. “The emphasis (in the 1990s) was in getting the ball in early in to what we called the scoring zone. We had a philosophy that if the ball was in there 30 to 35 times in a game and if we were to convert half of them, no matter how good or bad you would be, you would have 17 or 18 scores.
“Now you are seeing 0-12 and 1-9 or 1-10 winning games. It has definitely come back and it is down to tactics and people being afraid to lose.
“You watch matches now and you even count the number of players that even have a shot at goal. Each team has only three or four players that are allowed to shoot.”
Joyce attributes such negativity and the elevation in cynical fouling to the amount of time and effort players are giving to training these days but believes the black card would be unnecessary if officials were more consistent.
“You’ll get away with a pull in the first five or 10 minutes, because referees are reluctant to give out yellow cards early on. But in the last five minutes it is a booking, the game is stopped and it slows the match down.”
Had he one wish, it would be to address the tackle rule. Or lack of.
“While the GAA would say that the tackle is defined, there is still no defined tackle.
“A fella can still catch a ball at midfield and come down and be slapped with the left and right hand by an opponent in the ribs as if he is tackling the ball and a free is given against the player in possession for overcarrying. Then another time, it is pulled for a free. We need to define our tackles, define what a foul is and what is not, define what is a yellow card and what is not, and I think if we tidy that up more, we would be far better off.”
Supporters of the black card — and over two-thirds of delegates at Congress voted for the measure last month — will hope that it and other rule tweaks agreed in Derry will alter the balance of power back in favour of the Padraic Joyces of this world.
He hopes so too. “People go to the games to watch football being played and not this pulling and dragging. You go to games now and, as Benny Coulter said a couple of years ago, they are becoming hard to watch with mass defences and hand-passes. But that is just the way the game is gone and you have to get around that, and make the game better to watch and cutting out cynical fouling would make it a lot better.”
