Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
UNACCEPTABLE
EX-GAA chiefs call on Croke Park to put lid on ugly scenes staining our games
FORMER GAA presidents have thrown down the gauntlet to Croke Park to “get to grips” with tunnel brawls after Sunday’s Galway-armagh fracas.
Sean Kelly and Liam O’neill, who led the GAA from 2003-06 and 2012-15 respectively, said that the practice of both teams converging in the one area at half-time or, in the case of Sunday’s game, the end of normal time when extra time is to be played, needs to be eliminated.
Players, extended panel members and team management were all caught up in the melee that broke out after
Armagh forward Rian O’neill’s free ensured that an extra 20 minutes would have to be played, with Galway eventually winning out on penalties.
While most games may pass off without incident, Kelly said that players going down the same together is “a recipe for disaster”.
He said: “It’s always a worry that it may happen because all it takes is one person to push up against another or say something and then it can take off without people intending it to happen that way. I think really the solution here has to be, into the field and exit the field, both teams have different entrances and you wouldn’t have tunnel incidents any more.”
O’neill echoed those views. “In my time as GAA president I made a huge effort to clear the sidelines, I had it down to one manager and one runner on the sideline,” the Laois native told RTE Radio. “I think that’s more than enough.
“I really think we have to get to grips with this situation. We’d a situation in Croke Park where we had excellent dressing-rooms on both sides of the field; we could have used one for either team in the first game, one for either team in the second game, and avoided this.
“And people say, around the country, it’s the same – it’s
not. In Portlaoise we have two dressing-rooms; we have two ends, the players come out of either end of the same stand, and there’s never a difficulty.
“Admittedly, it was in response to a situation which developed – but we solved it, and I think Croke Park really have to get to grips with this.
“There’s no need for the extended panellists to go into the dressing-rooms at half-time.
What are they contributing there anyway?
“So, we really should have people sitting in a stand and have the manager and his selectors in the dressing-room with their players. It would be much tidier, and we wouldn’t have had this situation we had yesterday.”
Kelly acknowledged the level of outrage following the brawl is fuelled mainly by an apparent incident of eye-gouging.
He said: “I would think that the eye-gouging incident is on a different level and is something that we do not want to see ever happening again in the GAA and I would hope that that would be reflected in the punishment dished out to the perpetrator.” Tipperary senior hurling captain Ronan Maher said he has never been caught up in a tunnel incident before but, like O’neill, questioned why members of the extended panel were in the vicinity on Sunday.
He said: “Usually, they’d be on in the stand anyway, if they’re not on the match-day 26. The question is how they got onto the field.
“The game itself made for huge entertainment, and everybody was tuning into extra-time after that.
“We don’t really want to see that side of the game, and it’s sad really that we’re talking about that rather than the good game that was on before it.”
The eye-gouging situation is on a different level and I hope this will be reflected in the punishment..