Our GAA officials deserve to be treated with more respect
Hostile reaction to an umpire’s human error is hugely damaging
TECHNOLOGY can help Gaelic games but respect would transform them.
An umpire made a dreadful call in Semple Stadium, and his error could have a decisive impact on Waterford’s season.
It is only proper that a discussion about extending the use of technology in adjudicating scores should take place.
These conversations must, though, take cognisance of the fact that goal-line controversies are extremely rare.
That won’t console Waterford fans if their Championship is over by mid-June, but it is a fact. The cost and practicalities of goal-line technology must be set against how often such incidents occur.
A more persuasive case can be made for the use of television match officials, given their remit could extend to disciplinary infractions.
However, caveats apply here, too: the game would be inevitably slowed, and referees in rugby came to rely on their TMOs to the extent that hard decisions were being avoided in favour of endless replays.
Match officials have been advised to quicken their adjudications of late, but football and especially hurling are faster games than rugby union, and they would be affected by recourse to technology or video officials.
But this debate has alighted on technology when respect is more relevant.
The uproar that followed the incorrect awarding of a goal to Tipperary betrayed an attitude that marbles the GAA: the denigration of match officials.
When they make mistakes, they should have to account for them, and there is an onus on the GAA to ensure only the fittest and most competent officials are in charge of Championship matches.
But the frenzy that greeted an egregious but uncommon error in Thurles was remarkable. Not good enough, was the repeating cry. Players train too hard and for too long to have their summers left prey to the bad call of an umpire. That is balderdash. No system can render a playing field as sterile as an operating room, a theatre scrubbed free of the risk of outside interference. But in the GAA, blaming officials is a Pavlovian response, triggered by anything that happens to displease any of the assembled partisans. This is one of the most distasteful problems in the games, and it courses through them at every level. Referees, umpires and those doing the line at club matches are called every name under the sun, threatened and occasionally assaulted.
That last danger might not prevail at inter-county level, but there was nobody taking chances at the end of the Tipperary-Waterford game. It was particularly dispiriting to see two umpires escorted off surrounded by stewards and Gardaí, while Dan Shanahan tried to make a point to them.
One presumes he wasn’t remarking on the fine spell of weather, but no matter how disgruntled Shanahan was, interfering with officials in any way should be verboten.
That seems a laughable aspiration when managers can act the fool on sidelines throughout the summer and have their enthusiasm and their passion cooed over.
When Brian Cody described the decision of Barry Kelly to award a free against Kilkenny in the last movements of the drawn hurling final in 2014 as ‘criminal’, he received no meaningful sanction.
He was warned as to his future conduct, but he should have been heavily punished, including a sideline suspension.
It is only when Croke Park starts protecting its match officials, and ruthlessly punishing those who insist on treating them disrespectfully, that this rotten problem can be addressed.
That alone won’t solve it, because it has eaten into the culture like dry rot. But it can be tackled, and doing so is as important to the long-term health of hurling and football as technology is.
There is no glamour in choosing to be a referee, and less again in assisting one as an umpire.
Yet without them, the games can’t function. Last December, in a report to the Donegal county convention, that county’s referees’ administrator wrote of a chronic shortage of referees.
A special county board meeting held in Clare in January heard that some club matches may not be played there this year owing to the falling numbers of referees.
The Limerick secretary spoke of a ‘drastic need’ for new referees.
John Bannon, now an interesting analyst, spoke last November about the falling numbers willing to volunteer as umpires. ‘I’m not talking about the club scene either,’ he said. ‘It’s an issue for many intercounty referees.’
What happened last week will fuel no recruitment drive.
The umpire made a bad mistake. But human agency means that will sometimes happen.
Games can survive bad calls. They can’t function without officials.