It wouldn’t happen to a big gun, says McCandless amid
THE Irish Hockey world stood still on Sunday evening as a video umpire poured over replays of the now infamous tackle.
“It’s a penalty...” Diego Barbas eventually began, and then uttered the word that shocked a sporting nation: “...stroke”.
For many, a penalty stroke hadn’t even seemed an option when Lee Cole’s outstretched stick caught the right foot of Canadian James Wallace as the clock ticked down to zero in the fourth quarter of an Olympic qualifier in Vancouver.
Ireland, at 6-5 up on aggregate, had all but secured a place on the plane to Tokyo. Even as Canada referred the last-gasp incident and video official Barbas looked at the replay, it had seemed it was either game over or a penalty corner.
Bruce McCandless, who was watching on with Banbridge team-mates as his club’s star duo Eugene Magee and Johnny McKee were in the thick of the action, said: “I was pacing in between the kitchen and the living room. As far as we were concerned, it was a corner at worst. Everybody was just speechless. Heartbreaking. It was wrong.”
It’s a view that was shared by many across the hockey globe, especially given that the International Hockey Federation would later confirm that “umpires’ decisions are final” and therefore there is no right of appeal.
One of Ireland’s World Cup silver medallists, Megan Frazer, tweeted: “Absolutely robbed. Outrageous.”
Ronan Gormley, who played for Ireland at the 2016 Olympics, branded it “a sporting abomination”.
The surprise spread to the very highest levels of the game as one of Australia’s Olympic gold medallists from 2004, Grant Schubert, said the “shocking” decision had him “shaking (his) head”.
There were voices of dissent, including Mario DeMello, listed as a member of Canadian Hockey’s Officials Committee, who backed the video umpire’s decision, claiming the “defender reached from behind with no chance of playing the ball”.
Whatever the rights and wrongs, it’s a decision that ultimately costs Irish Hockey dear.
Given the magnitude of the situation, Bann’s McCandless wondered if the same fate would have been allowed to befall one of the world’s top teams.
“If it was against Belgium or Germany or Holland, would that decision have stood? I very much doubt it,” he said. “The tackle was an honest tackle. He (the video umpire) has got it wrong and I’m sure he knows it.
“It wasn’t as if it was in the moment, it was a considered call and he’s come up with that nonsense.”
Lisnagarvey head coach Errol Lutton knows all about the graft that goes on behind the scenes