Black card isn’t doing its job, insists Connolly
DIARMUID CONNOLLY has called on the GAA to follow soccer’s lead and issue a straight red card when a player is deliberately fouled to deprive a goal-scoring opportunity. Dublin’s four-time All-Ireland winner was hauled down by Kerry’s Jonathan Lyne in the recent Allianz League final at a critical stage. Only a point resulted with Lyne black carded for cynical play while Connolly later received the same caution for an off-the-ball incident. ‘Very like soccer, if it’s a clear goal-scoring opportunity, it should be a red card,’ added the two-time All-Star. Connolly insisted he is not a ‘cynical player’ after his second black card of the League campaign means that he now has a suspension hanging over him should he pick up a third as the AllIreland champions prepare for a title defence against Carlow or Wexford on June 3. ‘I would hope no one would see me as a cynical player. That’s not part of my game. Going forward and attacking is a big part of what I bring to the Dublin team. ‘The black card is there and it looks like it’s there to stay for at least this season. It’s brought in for cynical play. I don’t think it’s being used for cynical play.’
WHEN Diarmuid Connolly jetted out to the southern coast of Portugal to help put Dublin’s League final defeat by Kerry out of mind, a part of him was still wondering how his county’s hopes of an historic fifth Division 1 title in a row went west.
Just to rub it in, his own black card dismissal at a point when Dublin lead 0-8 to 0-5 marked the exact point in the game that the champions’ hold on the trophy loosened.
Coincidence or not, that was the last time Dublin would remain in such control. In the minutes that followed his dismissal, Paul Geaney and David Moran fired over points before a third-quarter surge left Connolly a spectator as Kerry captain Fionn Fitzgerald walked up the steps of the Hogan Stand to lift the trophy.
Imagine then his surprise when he checked into his hotel and recognised a few familiar Kerry faces. ‘It was hard to see him down in Vilamoura in the same hotel as me! Fionn, the girlfiend, Darran O’Sullivan, the girlfriend,’ said Connolly.
‘We rocked in on Wednesday morning with the golf clubs and who’s sitting there only the two Kerry boys! I said hello, of course. Ah they’re nice guys.’
It’s a sign of Connolly’s stature within the squad that his departure just happened to dovetail with the balance of power shifting in the game. Back at Croke Park yesterday for the launch of the Beko Club Bua award scheme, a new club accreditation and health check system co-ordinated by Leinster GAA for clubs in the province, he was in chipper form, wearing any pain of the League defeat lightly.
Whether on the subject of Dublin giving up a 36-match winning streak to the old enemy or his own black card dismissal, he addressed a multitude of talking points in straight-up fashion.
‘I just have to suck it up,’ he says of his dismissal against Kerry coming on the back of a more disputed call in a previous round against Monaghan. ‘It was frustration on my part rather than anything else.’
A disarming mea culpa rather than the opt out of blaming the referee, the rulebook or any other get out of jail card. It’s not the black card per se that he has a problem with, more that it should be reserved for deliberate foul play to deprive a goal scoring opportunity, which he says should be upgraded to a red-card offence.
‘Some of them you get away with and some of them you don’t. I certainly didn’t that day. If you look at them, the bulk of them are coming at the other end of the field.
‘Which is not what the black card was brought in for. I dragged a guy to the ground. Is that a cynical foul? Was it? I don’t think so. Was it a yellow card offence? Yeah, okay. Fair enough. But miss the whole game?
‘Look, you just move on. The black card is here to stay.
‘Sometimes they can be construed as yellow. There is a bit of a margin there and that’s up to the referee’s discretion, which I think frustrates the players a little bit more.
‘You want that clear definition. And that’s where it’s falling down, I think.’
His dismissal against Kerry came about after a linesman flagged the offence to referee Paddy Neilan. In the build-up to the final, Kerry manager Éamonn Fitzmaurice made a point of challenging the narrative that Kerry were more cynical in their approach than Dublin. Connolly doesn’t buy any suggestion that he was somehow a marked man as a result of Fitzmaurice’s wellaired claim.
‘I really honestly don’t know. I listen to Spotify, I don’t listen to the radio.’
Connolly points to the black card dismissal of fellow Dublin forward Con O’Callaghan as an example of the rule not working as intended.
‘You saw it with the Under 21s the last day [against Donegal]. Arguably Dublin’s best Under 21 player of the last five or six years plays six minutes of an All-Ireland semi-final.
‘Is that a cynical foul? No. By the letter of the law, is it a black card? Yes. So you’ve got to tailor your game. But I don’t think it’s right. I just don’t think it’s a part of the game that we need.’
As to whether Dublin will ever put together a winning streak like their most recent historymaking run? ‘People say a team like that comes around once in a generation, like the Kilkenny team... I really don’t know.’