Seamus Callanan anomaly forces rules rethink

GAA officials have confirmed to the Irish Examiner that a rule change passed at this year’s Congress will have to be revisited as a result of Tipperary forward Seamus Callanan’s late clearance to play in Sunday’s NHL semi-final against Waterford.

At this year’s Congress it was agreed, in an effort to put an end to dummy teams being named by managers, that all inter-county panels must be finalised by 9am on the Thursday before a game.

After that deadline additional players may not be added to the panel.

Although the rule comes into effect for the championship and did not apply last weekend, if a county chose, as Tipperary did, to exhaust all avenues and appeals in order to get a suspension lifted, then it is quite possible that they could be successful in getting a player free to play after that Thursday morning deadline.

Yesterday the GAA’s Operations Manager, Fergal McGill, said in relation to the matter: “I can say to you that we’d have to revisit. We didn’t consider those circumstances, so we’ll be looking at it again.

“It wouldn’t be uncommon for a change that’s made to the GAA rulebook to have to be tweaked once it’s applied in practical circumstances, I think people would understand that.

“Motions which are passed at Congress have to be tweaked once they’re applied.

“And as everybody knows, counties are quick to spot anomalies in the rulebook and to bring them to our attention as well.”

If the new rules had applied last weekend, for instance, then Cork would have been down three players. Mark Ellis and Cormac Murphy were named to start but picked up an illness and injury respectively on Thursday. Conor O’Sullivan was named as a substitute but withdrew from the panel.

Cork togged out Jamie Coughlan, Brian O’Sullivan and Aidan Ryan for Sunday’s game to replace those three players, but under the new rules they wouldn’t be allowed to do so and would only be permitted to tog out 23 players on the day of the game. Dublin lost Danny Sutcliffe to injury in the warm-up against Cork on Sunday, and under the new rules a player in the travelling party could not be promoted to the bench to replace him.

As the rule stands, counties could gamble if one of their players was pursuing an appeal after the Thursday morning deadline: he could be named on the panel and included if his appeal was successful, but if the appeal failed, the county would be left with 25 players rather than 26.

There was a good deal of attention paid to the rules last Sunday in Kilkenny as James Owens and Barry Kelly, who handled the Cork-Dublin and Waterford-Tipperary games respectively, applied the advantage rule.

Kelly showed his command of the laws of the game when correctly awarding a sideline cut, rather than a 65, late on to Tipperary when the sliotar struck the corner flag.