UNBELIEVABLE,JEFF

Gamesmanship reached an altogether different level at Croke Park last Sunday and it wasn’t because Sky’s double act was getting its first taste of an All-Ireland final

INGENUITY has been the buzz word this week ever since Lee Keegan reached over his shoulder and plucked his GPS receiver out of his shirt and fired it in Dean Rock’s direction as he ran up to take that free.

And since all that started well ended well — in that the flying object, while glancing off Rock’s boot on the follow through, did not prevent the most important kick of a football in this year’s Championship reaching its intended target — it has been played for laughs.

Dublin defender Philly McMahon suggested the GAA should address that funding issue if Mayo’s pockets run so deep that their players can take to tossing these pieces of hardware away with mischievous intent.

Others wondered if Keegan’s actions were a nod to the presence of Jeff Stelling and Chris Kamara in the commentary box, just to make them feel more at home by reminding that our game is now a crosspollination of all sports including cricket, as an All-Ireland football final witnessed for the first time an attempted stumping.

We like a laugh here too and we have seen ingenuity close up ourselves.

Many moons ago in London when a restart strategy simply meant trying to get a start for the second time, we had a kicking out issue in that our goalkeeper could not kick it out.

This was prior to the advent of the GAA allowing kicking tees, so after a pre-match meeting where his inability to put the ball into the air invited a public intervention, the goalie came up with his own solution.

He produced a green-coloured sock from his bag which he placed down his togs and then used it as a prop to tee up the ball in the hope that his ingenuity might compensate for his incompetence.

It went swimmingly for a quarter before the referee — quite possibly disturbed by our man’s frequent habit of scooping his hand inside his togs — came in for a closer look and blew time on it.

In fairness, he saw the funny side, heaving with laughter while shaking his head, ‘I have seen a lot of things in 30 years refereeing, but that beats them all,’ he chortled.

Our man whiled away many an idle hour in the dug-out thereafter by spinning that yarn to anyone within ear-shot.

Thing is, though, it is harder to make a laughing matter about last Sunday.

Rock’s father, Dublin legend Barney, raised the important point the morning after as to what would have happened had the unit hit the ball on the point of impact to sabotage the kick.

And what if Rock scuffed his kick turned it over and Mayo went down the other end to kick the winning score?

Would we have been so seduced by the end of the great famine that we would not have been bothered unduly?

You would hope not but this is about a culture of cynicism that has morphed into acceptable practice.

Cormac Costello after legitimately discarding David Clarke’s kicking tee which was on the pitch while the ball was in play proceeded to the other side of Clarke’s goal and appeared to interfere with other tees prior to that crucial last kickout.

And, of course, for that restart just about every intended Mayo receiver had effectively and illegally been body-wrapped by their Dublin opponent.

There is nothing new in any of this — remember Barry John Keane kicking the ball off Paul Durcan’s tee at the end of the 2014 All-Ireland final.

What’s different though is not just the acceptance but the celebration of such acts.

In any other sport, the idea of a player throwing a foreign object at an opponent while in play would

incite outrage and demand consequences rather than invite belly laughs.

But there is no stomach for that in GAA land.

This week the Kerry forward Paul Geaney cited the cynicism at the end of an epic game of ball as one of the areas he found illuminating because that’s how players have become conditioned to think.

It is the unwritten code that you do whatever is necessary to win, but there is no other ball sport that has so eagerly embraced lawlessness as a pathway to victory.

But, then, what are players to do when time and again they are given a free hand to test the moral limits of a sport by an association that has tackled cynicism on a piece-meal basis with an ill-fitting black card, with the end result that it has become rampant.

The irony last Sunday was that in the closing minutes of the minor final, when David Clifford was confirmed as man of the match, applause rang around the stadium.

The wonder now is how quickly he will make the step-up to a senior game where he will find in time that his impact will be compromised by a culture that will celebrate the ingenuity of those who will apply foul as well as fair means to stop him.

The sad thing is when it happens you will get plenty of people to clap for that too.