A strong sense of grievance can go a long way
THEY say time wasted is not always a waste of time. That thought occurred to me this week when I heard that not only were Tyrone appealing all four red cards shown by referee David Gough at the Athletic Grounds earlier this month, but they were going to put their best foot forward at last Monday night’s Central Hearings Committee.
All four — Pádraig Hampsey, Kieran McGeary, Peter Harte and Michael McKernan — did not chance their arms remotely, instead they travelled down the road to Croke Park for individual hearings that went so deep in the night that the inquisitions crossed into the early morning.
As players, we have all been on the naughty step at some point or other in our careers, and if the chance exists to get off it — then you take it.
However, you would not need a degree in rocket science to know which way the wind was going to blow on this one.
Gough went out on a limb to apply the rules, sending off three of the four for contributing to a melee and one for striking, along with Armagh’s Greg McCabe.
As I wrote here last week, had that incident occurred at the start of the second half rather than the end of it, I doubt Gough would have taken that action.
And anyone who watched last Saturday night’s game between Limerick and Galway hurlers, when a similar waltzing-outsidethe-chipper exhibition took place at the start of the second half, will have seen that referee Feargal Horgan restricted himself to sending off just Gearóid Hegarty for a clear striking offence. However, all the other contributors to a melee did not see the colour of a card.
When there is no uniform application of the rule then it really undermines the message that Gough had sought to send, namely that these ugly incidents should not be tolerated.
But, then, if refereeing inconsistency was a valid argument for overturning suspensions, no player would have to do time.
And I suspect the Tyrone County Board, their joint managers Feargal Logan and Brian Dooher, as well as the four players concerned, knew the realities of that trip to Dublin.
After all, for those charged under ‘contribution to a melee’, it was an open-and-shut case because it does not take a whole pile of hard evidence to prosecute once there is footage of players on the dance floor.
And yet, the trip to the capital may not amount to a waste of time.
It is rare for a player to make a public comment prior to attending a hearing but that is just what Hampsey did last Monday when he managed to make both a public act of contrition while articulating his sense of grievance in almost the same breath.
‘It’s one we’re not proud of ourselves as a county and as players,’ he said of the skirmish. ‘It’s a hard one to take when Tyrone ended up getting four red cards and Armagh ended up getting one.
‘We probably feel a bit done on it that way.’
But you can’t really claim to have been ‘done’ until you go, quite literally the extra miles, to ensure that your pleas for clemency have been rejected for good measure.
There is no player worth their salt, and no dressing room either, that can’t bleed something of real value from a sense of grievance rooted in the belief that the world is set against you.
Given it was a melee in which both teams wilfully took part, Tyrone do have some right on their side and we can expect them to amplify the sense that they have been ‘done’ in their dressing room today, just to get a little extra out of their players.
In the bigger picture after GAA director-general Tom Ryan insisted Kerry were owed a ‘debt of gratitude’ for accommodating Tyrone’s two-week delay of the Championship, the Red Hands may even see the disciplinary fallout from the Athletic Grounds as somehow being linked to that stand-off last summer.
There is no truth in that, of course, but you are an innocent in the manufacturing of grievance business if you believe the truth is an essential component. It’s isn’t, because it is whatever you want it to be.
In that sense, Kildare could be in for yet another hard lesson on life in the top tier today.
Expect Tyrone to amplify the feeling they’ve been ‘done’ in Omagh today
After all, it is easy to believe they have a chance and had they been given an input into who would be missing for Tyrone, they would surely have selected opposition captain Hampsey, footballer of the year McGeary and two-time AllStar veteran Harte.
And genuinely they have a chance, but the real fun today will be in watching how Tyrone respond.
I have been in Omagh enough times to know that it is not the most hospitable of environments, and there is little comfort in its intimacy. Indeed, my old team-mate Paul Galvin will testify to that after Ryan McMenamin reached parts of him no other man would dare, when things turned ugly at the end of our League clash in 2009.
It won’t be like that today. Their temper will be in the football, their drive will come from the four players who will take the place of those who they will believe have been unfairly treated, and the points will be theirs at the end.
Because in Tyrone they know the difference between time wasted and a waste of time.