Where would the referees come from for a league championship?
Conor McGill of Meath is shown the red card by referee Barry Cassidy during the Allianz Football League Division 2 semi-final earlier this year. Picture: Piaras Ó Mídheach/Sportsfile
Former referees are concerned about the workload facing officials in an expanded senior inter-county football championship.
Recent discussions of the proposals to revamp the championship focused on financial returns and the role of the provincial councils.
However, former All-Ireland referee Barry Kelly has pointed out that if the number of inter-county fixtures doubles, which would be the case with one of the proposals, then the number of inter-county referees can’t just be doubled in order to cover those games.
“I was my club’s delegate when we voted at the Westmeath county board,” says Kelly.
“Westmeath was in favour of Plan B, but there was a reference in the discussions to the number of inter-county games which would then be played — that it was going from 66 to 135, which is over double the number of inter-county games.
“Would you just double the number of inter-county referees, then? The answer is no, because you wouldn’t be able to.
“The refereeing co-ordinators in the provinces would tell you that they wouldn’t have enough referees at inter-county senior level in football to do that.
Former chairman of the GAA’s National Referees Development committee, Willie Barrett, is more optimistic.
“It would depend on how many matches you’d have in a particular weekend, and how many referees you’d require for those matches.
“At present you have 15 referees on the inter-county panel, and Croke Park could comfortably bring that up to 20.
“Twenty referees could facilitate 20 games in a weekend, and in football, if you have 32 counties playing on a particular weekend, then you have 16 games, so 20 referees cover that.
“There’s certainly five or six more referees capable of coming onto the inter-county panel to make up the 16 needed on a ‘busy’ weekend like that.”
Still, with the idea of Friday night championship games being floated to fit in the fixtures, could referees be facing two big championship games in one weekend?
“If you’re talking about asking referees to handle top teams in knock-out games, you wouldn’t ask a player to line out for a championship game with the county on Friday and then again on Sunday,” says Kelly.
“You wouldn’t ask him to play a club game after that.
“If you were asked to referee two inter-county championship games on the same weekend, with everything on the line, it would hardly be a surprise if you made mistakes in the second game.
“But referees may have to double up on big weekends because even if you have referees on a provincial panel, you can’t just decide overnight that those should be promoted to the national panel just because there are more games being played.”
Barrett acknowledges the number of games may be a challenge, but still believes that it’s “manageable”.
“The problem you might have is with standby referees, particularly with games on a Saturday and a Sunday. What you might be able to do is take a referee who’s handling a game on a Saturday and get him, then, to act as a standby referee on the Sunday.
“You could get over it that way. I believe it’s manageable, particularly in football. I can think of four or five referees, certainly, who would have been on the verge of the inter-county panel from my involvement in recent years in Croke Park, and they would certainly be ready for that by now.
“That would give you some leeway in terms of numbers of referees, but beyond that, you’d be looking down the line.
A sharp increase in the number of senior inter-county games is different to the usual challenges when it comes to recruiting referees, says Kelly — the abuse from the sidelines from parents and managers, for instance, or the rule changes which referees have to accommodate on a regular basis.
Doubling the number of inter-county football games puts a stress on different parts of the system, he points out.
“Some of the Westmeath umpires who would have worked with me would work with other referees now, the likes of John Keenan or James Owens. One umpire who’s a friend of mine, Paul Reville, is used by eight or nine different referees in Westmeath every weekend.
“That’s because a good umpire is another undervalued commodity, and with an increase in the number of games you have to multiply that increase by four for umpires and two for linesmen.
“So with a referee included, that means seven officials for each game.
“It’s hard to get people to act as umpires because it means giving 10 or 12 hours of a Sunday for what — a chicken Kiev on the way home? We try in Westmeath to have a neutral team of officials for every game, but that takes a lot of work. Phone calls, texts, mails. And it’s the same getting people together to officiate for inter-county games.”
The pressure on referee numbers exists at all levels — but for different reasons, he adds.
“What I’ve seen is a group of 10 or 12 people from different clubs doing a refereeing course run by a county board, but some of them may have no intention of refereeing — they may be getting updated on the rules or just doing the course so their club can say it has another ref among its members.
“As a result, you may just get one or two out of the group who actually comes through as a referee.
“Obviously it takes a good few more years for them to come through as a senior inter-county referee, and they may never do that.
“There’s probably enough for them to do at club level, anyway. Going by the example in Westmeath, we have 47 clubs, but we may have as many as 2,000 games to be refereed.
“Compare that to the number of clubs in Cork and other big counties, and multiply those numbers by competitions — you could be talking about 10,000 games in Cork. You can see the pressure there on referee numbers.”
As for the occasional call for inter-county players to get involved in officiating ...
“The odd time you hear that — get former inter-county players to come forward and become referees, that that would improve standards,” says Kelly.
“That sounds fine in theory, but you’re talking about someone who may have given 10 or 12 years, or more, to playing inter-county, with all of the time commitments involved in doing so.
“I’m not sure how feasible that would be as a proposition, particularly when the player would have to tell their spouse or partner about their new plan to miss more weddings and christenings and so on as an inter-county referee.
“In reality, is that going to happen? I don’t think so.”
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