John Martin: Pull the nails out of the coffin

BACK TO BASICS…Hurling was saved again, hurrah!

IT’S okay, we can all breathe a collective sigh of relief. It turns out that hurling’s not dead after all. Pull the nails out of the coffin because Clare and Waterford were only toying with us two weeks ago and they have in fact not forgotten that they’re also in the entertainment business.

It makes you wonder how many times hurling died back in the days when we were treated to just three or four live games a year on television? How many hurling wakes were left unattended simply because a one line reference in a newspaper report to the effect that ‘it wasn’t one for the purists’ was probed no further?

And yes, I am aware of the irony of mocking the over-analysis of our national games in a publication dedicated to analysing our national games, but in a year when the overall standard of entertainment in the Allianz League has been decent, and certainly an improvement on 2015, the mourning for hurling’s impending demise after the drawn League final was way over the top.

There’s no doubting that the drawn game was a bore-fest but the doomsday scenarios that accompany any live TV game that doesn’t leave us salivating for more brings a raft of obituaries that are already becoming clichéd.

The referee also got his usual dissection and, as with Barry Kelly’s ‘criminal’ decision at the end of the drawn 2014 All-Ireland final, the spotlight is always shone that much brighter when the controversial call comes in the dying minutes of a nail-biting decider.

It was Diarmuid Kirwan in the firing line this time round, and as with Kelly’s call two years ago, it could have gone either way. John Mullane and, somewhat surprisingly, Bernard Flynn were among the high profile ex-players who lambasted Kirwan who incurred their wrath not for inconsistency, but apparently for making decisions in the final seconds of a crucial game.

Had a similar free been awarded earlier in the game, there would have been no post-mortem. I didn’t read any reference in Mullane’s column to Patrick Curran’s six steps before he slammed the sliotar home after 17 seconds of the game for example. No doubt in the interests of consistency Mullane will take the opportunity next week to call for the goal to be disallowed.

Mullane felt that Kirwan had missed a free on Jamie Barron just before Tony Kelly ‘won’ then converted his free in the 71st minute. Yes, Barron was fouled but, honestly – how many refs would have blown for that foul when Barron had come out of the challenge with the ball? Very few. If a ref was minded to, he could blow for a foul after virtually every tackle. The one that he did blow for in favour of Clare (that was converted by Kelly to tie the scores) was extremely soft, and I can understand the frustration of the Waterford fans given that it followed so soon after the tackle on Barron.

But that is part of the game. And whether we like it or not, it is a huge part of what makes the game of hurling so great. I don’t want Barron to be appealing for a foul every time his jersey gets tugged, I want to see Barron doing exactly what he did on Sunday – keep on hurling without the need to fall to the ground as if hit with a sniper’s bullet. I don’t want the ref giving a free for it every single occasion either, and likewise I don’t want to see Curran’s goal disallowed because he stole one or two extra steps.

If we go down the road of every single infraction being blown by the ref, then the game would be ruined as a spectacle. But with that comes a cost, and the cost is that once in every 10 games or so, there will be a game so tight that a refereeing decision impacts on the result. Sometimes it will work for your team and sometimes it will work against.

I don’t think technology in the form of a TMO is the answer either. It may be useful on some occasions such as sorting out a brawl or eradicating what would have been a ‘hop ball’ decision but for ruling on a foul, the TMO would on most occasions merely highlight that in a passage of play, a number of minor infractions were ignored by the referee.

Going back to the 2014 drawn All-Ireland final, Ger Loughnane, Tomás Mulcahy and Cyril Farrell were the summarisers in the RTE studio that day. After Hogan was blown for charging, the assembled experts noted that some refs would have given the free the other way. That was it. None of them attempted to explain why or if Kelly was right or wrong.

None of them were vexed about it, and the inference was that had the free been given to Hogan, or not given at all, they wouldn’t have been particularly vexed about it either. Had it not been a close game and subsequently spawned Brian Cody’s comments, it would never have been spoken of again.

But that’s the trade-off: let the referee interpret the game and contribute to the spectacle, or have him blow his whistle every 10 seconds and turn to the TMO. If that was the case would we be talking about a classic League final this week?
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