O’Neill happy to wait to get hooter system 100% right

Liam O’Neill has expressed the GAA’s ‘relief’ at having road-tested the hooter system at this year’s Sigerson and Fitzgibbon cups while reasserting his commitment that the new procedure will be in place for the 2015 championships.

The association has now postponed the introduction of the time-keeping format twice in recent years, the latest delay coming on Saturday when Central Council examined the evidence accruing from the recent third-level competitions.

A detailed five-page report on the trials was subsequently released by the association yesterday which, in itself, explains why a seemingly simply system which is already used in ladies’ football is taking so much time and effort to get right.

“We weren’t satisfied that we had it fine-tuned with our rules well enough and that we had every situation covered,” said O’Neill. “To go with it without being 100% sure, we wouldn’t have been happy to do that.

“In fairness to the players who train hard and put in the effort for the championship, we need to have this 100% right.”

“What we are going to do is further experimentation with a view to having it corrected. Sometimes you can only see the difficulties by experimentation. We are terribly relieved that we did experiment.”

The experiment worked reasonably well, it seemed. On average, the clock was stopped twice per game and the longest half recorded — at a grade where 30-minute periods are played — was only 32 minutes 20 seconds.

That gave the lie to fears expressed about playing times being stretched significantly, but the report remarked that there was definite confusion over aspects of the system and stressed the need for an education programme to be put in place.

There were only three stoppages over the course of the six games that were not for injuries. In the first of these, the clock was stopped when a referee ran to the other end of the field to consult his umpires on a disciplinary issue before sanctioning players.

The second was when a melee ensued and the referee stopped the clock to identify and sanction those involved. The third involved the referee stopping the clock to warn the backroom teams about behaviour.

Referees, it claimed, were indifferent about the changes but they did report that, if anything, the new timing procedures added to their workloads rather than subtract from them. Among the main issues highlighted were the need to solidify the communication system between the men in the middle and the fifth official, who will be in charge of time-keeping as well as when the clock should restart after a stoppage.

These are merely procedural issues which will not require any change of rule.

More serious were the debates over substitutions and the danger of teams using them to run the clock down, as well as the seemingly simple, yet ultimately complex question as to when exactly a game is deemed to be over.

That latter issue almost caused a furore in one of the games played under the experimental system when a player struck a shot in or around the time the hooter sounded. When exactly, no one could agree and therein lay the rub.

The ball went wide but had it gone over it would have been the source of massive controversy as to whether it should stand or not as there was little or no consensus met on the day in question.

The report stated: “Had such an incident occurred in a senior football or hurling championship game and led to a team losing a game in such circumstance, the reputational damage to the association — not to mention possible legal challenges within or without our own Rulebook — would be enormous.”

The recommendations put forward to clarify these matters are fundamentally simple: to stop the clock for all substitutions or those inside the last five minutes and to deem a game over only when the ball goes out of play after the clock has timed out. All of these tweaks will be given a road test later this year during the Higher Education Leagues and only then will the necessary motions be drawn up for Congress to bring them officially into rule.

“So, there are a number of issues there,” said O’Neill. “The questions have been posed, we have to answer them. Not only do we have to answer them, we have to marry them to rule. We haven’t that fully done, unfortunately.”