McGee: Black card has been a success

The chairman of the committee that proposed the introduction of Gaelic football’s black card believes, by and large, it has proven to be a success in its first year.

Eugene McGee headed up the now-defunct Football Review Committee and, while admitting there are a few issues which need to be ironed out, he is happy the disciplinary measure fulfilled its primary functions.

“Some things stick out,” he says. “There are less frees and more scores, that’s the first thing. You’d have to wait until next year to see if that’s maintained but there’s no particular reason why it wouldn’t be.

“The goals are up, the points are up and there have been fewer cards and frees. That has to be good and we’ve seen a similar trend in club games. A lot of people might have thought club referees would ignore it, I felt myself it might be a danger.

“It was never going to revolutionise football, but the minute there’s any attempt to curb indiscipline in the GAA, there’s an automatic kick-back from a lot of people.

“The standard reply is physicality is being taken out of the game.” Ensuring referees apply the rules correctly and don’t settle for showing a yellow card instead of a black is where McGee thinks the biggest improvements can be made.

“The number of cards overall is down by about 40 percent,” he says, “the yellow and red cards have been reduced even though there might be a perception referees have used the yellow card when they should have shown the black card.

“That has been the biggest complaint and I would fear it to some extent quite a few yellow cards should have been black cards. The most obvious one I suppose was Shane Enright in the All-Ireland semi-final against Mayo.

“It’ll need another year for discrepancies to be clarified and the referees will have to be more definite about it. It’s it a black card, then issue it.

“It’s inbred in the GAA DNA, don’t send a fella off unless he has half-killed a player. That’s a problem that I presume the referees are working on over the winter and hopefully they’ll solve it. If it’s a black card, it should be a black card.”

Overall, however, he feels the clamping down on cynical fouling has made for a better spectacle.

“There was a strong minority lobbying against it but most of those have come out since and said it was a good idea,” he says.

The main thing that I was interested in was stop people fouling, to get them to tackle properly and not give away silly frees.

“Some are accidental, we know that, but the reason everyone latched on to the black card was because of the cynical fouls, the deliberate ones to stop the play.

“It was too easy to just pull a player down and you weren’t really penalised, provided you fouled in the right place. This has forced more players and managers to correct their messing.

“It has been a good tidying-up exercise and it has stopped cynical fouling and the third-man tackle.”