THE GAA MUST NOT FAIL ITS OFFICIALS
But the portents are not good after just one weekend of action
THERE are better ways to be heard other than bellowing into the nearest megaphone. In the fall-out to the 2011 All-Ireland football final; when the manner of their defeat, and what they felt was referee Joe McQuillan’s influence on it was still bitter to the taste, they bit hard on their tongues in Kerry and restricted what they had to say to discerning ears.
The Kerry management made contact with Croke Park, the gist of which sought a query as to how they could justify McQuillan’s appointment for the final.
In a one-point game, his calls inevitably made a difference but in that instance what referee’s decisions wouldn’t?
Still, there was a consensus afterwards that a number of wrong calls, which bled scores, had gone against them. Included were Eoin Brosnan being erroneously penalised for picking the ball off the ground as well as the match-winning free converted by Stephen Cluxton.
They had a number of bones to pick, including a query as to whether it amounted to best practice to appoint the same referee for two-thirds (four out of six) of Dublin’s games that summer.
They are still waiting for the answer, but in a way they may have already got it. McQuillan takes charge of Kerry’s game against Derry today in Celtic Park for only the second time since he blew the final whistle on them back in 2011.
Given the shallow pool of inter-county referees, it was quite the achievement to keep them apart for 20 games over twoand-a-half years before last year’s League clash with Kildare, so someone must have been listening.
Kerry’s angst was kept behind locked doors. Their protest registered without the need to access a megaphone in a bid to humiliate the referee, and their displeasure directed at those in charge of the appointment rather than the individual charged with the whistle.
You could also argue that by way of that two-and-half year cooling off period, they got a result of sorts. It should be a better one than awaits Peter Creedon, the Tipperary football manager who cut ugly and loose on Meath referee David Coldrick last Sunday.
His team had been caught on the line, after Jamie Clarke speared over two injury-time points, the winning one coming after the minimum two minutes of additional time had elapsed. Throw that into a pot with the award of a first-half penalty to Armagh and the sending off of centre-back Robbie Kiely (in separate incidents) and Creedon saw red as well when briefing the press afterwards.
‘The performance of the referee was atrocious. He’s not a Division 1 ref. He’s not fit for inter-county refereeing. Not on that performance anyway. If he’s reffing in places l i ke Armagh, he has to be brave enough and bold enough to make the right calls and he made an awful lot of dubious ones.
‘I know we’re not supposed to be giving out about referees but we’re putting too much effort into this to be robbed by the ref there at the end,’ he raged.
Incredibly, Creedon will be on the sideline today in Templetuohy as Tipperary host Limerick in Division 3. The CCCC has not yet sought to invoke a new regulation, allowing them to propose a sanction which would withdraw ‘side-line privileges’ from managers who are deemed to have crossed the line in their criticism of a referee in either pre or post match engagements with the media.
Surely the serious nature of Creedon’s comments demanded the CCCC should have acted immediately to acknowledge the slight on of one of their top referees. As it is, th they could have done with being qu quicker out of the traps for the sa sake of optics alone, given the h ham-fisted manner in which the they dealt with this issue last au autumn. That move last November by the Central Council to introduce a new regulation inevitably was seen in the context of Brian Cody’s extraordinary savaging of B Barry Kelly, who labelled t the Westmeath official’s d decision to award Tipperar ary a free in the final play of the drawn All-Ireland final as ‘crim ‘criminal’.
In reality, it was not quite the knee-jerk reaction from the GAA it may have looked. In his annual report last year, the GAA Director General Páraic Duffy conceded public criticism of referees by managers was a problem. However the severity of a two-month sanction – the penalty for discrediting the association – suggested there was little appetite to implement it.
‘A more appropriate sanction in the match regulations would be the withdrawal of sideline privileges for a number of games. I believe that this would be an effective deterrent,’ wrote Duffy, 10 months prior to the regulation being introduced.
BUT sometimes perception overpowers the reality. And the perception last autumn was that the GAA did not have the stomach to punish Cody, which may feed into the suggestion that there is one rule for the powerful and another for the Tipperary football manager, should Creedon be served with delayed justice.
Again that ignores that the CCCC charged Cody with discrediting the association, but the prospect of an eight-week ban evaporated when the Kilkenny manager sought a hearing and received no more than a slap on the wrist and a warning to mind his tongue.
That decision was hard to fathom and, while they kept their counsel, it is believed that it did not sit well with refe- rees or their chief Pat McEneaney. The fall-out suggests the GAA is soft when it comes to protecting its match-officials.
Even the decision to seek an alternative to the eight-week sanction, because it was deemed too harsh, carries the inevitable connotation that taking a referee’s reputation in public is a lighter shade of black.
True, had Cody’s eight-week ban stood in practical terms it would have meant little given that it would have been served in the close season, but it would have left a stain on the greatest managerial career in the GAA’s history. It might have prompted others to think again, before, with the world and its mother listening, they decide to rubbish the competence of volunteers, who have homes, families. clubs and communities to face back into.
That latter point should not be forgotten. Before Christmas, Patrick Nelis, a referee in Meath, revealed how social media abuse in the wake of a county final he had taken charge of had left him in ‘floods of tears’. Already battling with depression, he made an attempt to take his life.
That is an extreme case but there can be no half-measures when the GAA comes to protecting those whose voice is rarely heard. It took only one weekend of national competition to test the GAA’s conviction that it is now better armed to deal with this. Already, it has been slow to meet the challenge. It dare not fail this time.