Unholy mess turns into a free for all

In the movie version of No Country For Old Men, a sheriff and his deputy come across the aftermath of a massacre in the Texas badlands.

“It’s a mess, ain’t it, sheriff?” says the deputy.

“If it ain’t,” says the sheriff, “It’ll do till the mess gets here.”

Well, after the flailing nonsense we heard on The Sunday Game last weekend, the GAA has now offered a new interpretation (or a new, new interpretation) of the rules governing 20-metre frees and penalties in hurling.

By a rough count, that means next weekend’s hurling games will be governed by the third different rules regime seen this calendar year.

The National Hurling League was handled under one set of rules, where goalkeepers couldn’t rush out to stop frees, while the Cork-Waterford replay came under rules which allowed the opposite (though Wayne McNamara of Limerick tweeted that he and his colleagues had been warned that they had to stay on the goal-line the previous weekend).

This weekend’s games, finally, will be refereed according to the new interpretation: version three.

Such a new interpretation was inevitable after the conflation of lifting and striking issued last weekend to The Sunday Game; in truth, no-one considers lifting the ball to be the same as striking it.

A more precise description would suggest that once the ball is lifted, then it is active but not in play, in the same way that no-one would suggest that hooking a goalkeeper once he throws the ball up to take a puck-out is legal.

(Come to that, is a footballer taking a free from his hands liable to be charged when he drops the ball to kick it? According to last weekend’s logic of lifting equals striking, he must be).

There are so many questions here that it’s difficult to know where to start. For instance, who issued the interpretation to The Sunday Game last weekend and on what authority? The GAA has been consistent in saying rules can’t be changed except at Congress, yet here’s a hugely significant difference in policing of the game: was there a secret Congress nobody was told about or can the person who told The Sunday Game that lifting is the same as striking now be taken as the voice of the rule book? Regarding the specifics of last Sunday’s game, was referee Johnny Ryan told about this new interpretation before taking charge of Cork v Waterford? If he wasn’t, why wasn’t he? If he was, did he communicate to the two teams that such a material change to the playing rules had occurred? Were Ryan’s assessor and other senior refereeing figures satisfied Ryan’s interpretation was correct? Should all referees now meet coaches before games and inform them of an significant differences in how the games are to be policed? Can the new direction, which looks suspiciously like a rule, if truth be told, be anything other than a cosmetic exercise? Otherwise, next weekend’s free takers have three to four days to recalibrate their technique: how fair is that?

Maybe the Munster Council should offer Ger Loughnane a free holiday for selling next Sunday’s game better than any marketing guru could have. On a serious note, though nobody may want to admit it, the GAA has been utterly derelict in its duty of care to one of its members: Anthony Nash.

For the last 10 months, the Cork goalkeeper has been uniquely identified with the new free-taking technique — this writer offers his mea culpas along with everybody else — while other players worked on and perfected the approach.

This was not aided the other morning when the president of the GAA made such a point of not wanting to personalise the free-taking issue that he only mentioned Nash’s name three times in discussing the matter.

All of this has created a hugely unfair focus on one player and has ominous overtones for any youngster seeking to perfect his skills: learn to hit the ball harder than anyone else, and we’ll change the rules to counteract it.

Yes, the mess is already here.