John Fogarty
IT’S not in David Coldrick’s nature to think his calf injury helped him dodge a bullet last Sunday but plenty will argue otherwise.
The Meathman had been named to officiate in last Sunday’s Leinster semi-final before he had to pull out with the setback on the Friday and was replaced by fellow county man Cormac Reilly.
If people think he got off lightly, what say they of him being handed the job of refereeing a Kerry v Cork Munster final? As a former Waterford hurler famously once said, out of the chip van and into the fire.
There’ll be no pats on the back for Coldrick come 4pm on Sunday. If he’s lucky, he’ll be complimented for not getting in the way. His fellow Meathman Colm O’Rourke will be the first to shake his hand if he delivers on that.
But this is Kerry v Cork. It’s not as much a rivalry as it is a battle. The two teams have played each other 10 times over the last championships. In that period, as much as they have given us some absorbing affairs there has been a flurry of yellow and red cards as well as retrospective suspensions.
The last time they met in a Munster final in 2008 there were three red cards dished out. Two of them were deserved, the other for Marc Ó Sé a nonsensical decision on the part of referee Derek Fahy who was undoubtedly influenced by the Cork crowd close to the incident. In the cold light of a boardroom, the sending off was later rescinded.
Coldrick will have to get involved in Killarney on Sunday. Each team is sure to test just how much he’s willing to let go and he will likely set an early precedent that he won’t tolerate persistent foul play.
Whether the supporters or viewing public like that or not is irrelevant to him. He’s given a job to do. Rules to follow. Even if few if any appreciate that.
As he wrote in his Irish Life blog this week: “All referees are big enough to take criticism of individual decisions on the basis of erroneous implementation of the playing rules but where criticism is sometimes based on someone’s ‘own’ set of rules which may bear little resemblance to the actual playing rules adopted by the GAA, it can be hard.”
Referees can and should be criticised when they do wrong but how many of us are so well-versed in the rules that we can condemn them at the drop of a height? It just seems like a bandwagon now.
This writer found fault with a number of calls made by Reilly in Croke Park last Sunday but what turned out to be the most important decision he got right.
Bernard Brogan was impeded by Andriu Mac Lochlainn. Yet listening to the co-commentary of Kevin McStay you would swear Reilly committed a most heinous act when it was the former Mayo player who seemed to lose all composure not only in reacting to the free but also Kildare’s last couple of scores.
McStay is regarded as the rules expert among RTÉ’s bevy of analysts so it shouldn’t come as a surprise to him that there were genuine grounds for Reilly to make the call.
Yet he appeared oblivious to that, keener to emphasise that in the context of the game and the timing of the free Reilly was wrong.
McStay’s comments represented the vast majority of the country but that doesn’t mean he was right. He was wrong, in fact, because refereeing, as much as we might like it to be otherwise, is not about common sense.
The ironic thing is while Pat McEnaney is universally acknowledged as the best referee in the country, he is so because he takes a laissez-faire approach to the rules. He might be the most acceptable man in black on the street but it’s worth pointing out he hasn’t been rewarded with the biggest prize, an All-Ireland final, since 2004.
There’s obviously a disconnect here and what the GAA/referees and the public want are two completely different things. What one might say is black the other will argue is white.
On the Ulster semi-final game between Derry and Armagh which he refereed earlier this month, Coldrick wrote in his blog: “It was a very open game of football with both teams using accurate kick passing a lot more than has become the norm in the football championship in recent years.”
And yet Coldrick handed out 10 yellow cards in that game.
The matter at hand is interpretation whether it was constitutes a good game, a good refereeing performance or a good call. At the kernel of it all is the fact there is no definitive tackle in the GAA but that’s another story.
As much as there is a genuine problem with the consistency of free-awarding by referees, their knowledge of the precise rules of the game is better than most people’s.
Recent rule changes such as punishment for persistent fouling are not known to the wider public so it’s not surprising that they find fault with something they don’t quite understand.
This failure to communicate could be remedied if, as mentioned by Colm O’Connor and national referees committee chairman Mick Curley on the Irish Examiner GAA podcast earlier this month, a referee/ex-referee appeared on The Sunday Game to explain why decisions were made.
Until such time as we park the why and ask why not, referees will come under more fire. People such as Bernard Flynn will spout populist drivel about all the managers not being wrong (yes, they can) and all referees’ assessors being poor or failed match officials (no, they’re not).
With 14 games last weekend, there was plenty more material with which to slate referees. The weekend after this one, there will be 12. It’s not a case of if there will be trouble ahead – there will be.
Source: http://feeds.examiner.ie/~r/iesportsblog/~3/4v4Tz8KSn2Q/post.aspx
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