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Eimear Ryan: Spare a thought for the referee

It’s a great honour to be centre-stage on one of the biggest days of the GAA calendar, but from another perspective, it’s a poisoned chalice.
Eimear Ryan: Spare a thought for the referee

In The On Man Will First Sunday Ireland His Final Middle: All Murphy Referee Johnny Referee

SPARE a thought for Tipperary fans living in Cork.

Last year we could hold our heads high, playing our part in another Munster classic, a frantic scorefest finishing level in Páirc Uí Chaoimh on a glorious summer’s evening.

This year was more of a damp squib, outnumbered in our own backyard and dealt a ferocious hammering by a Cork team on the crest of a wave.

You have taken a fair amount of slagging. 

You might now be tempted to root for Clare, who kindly dealt us less of a hammering, and who have yet to peak this year, it seems. 

But look, you played for a Cork club for years and, yes, you do always enjoy the Cork swagger and, fine, you might wear your UCC jersey on the day of the match, as a kind of halfway house, not quite full-blown support but signalling some level of affiliation. 

Cork has treated you well, all in all. May the best team win.

Spare a thought for Johnny Murphy. The Limerick man is refereeing his first All-Ireland hurling final next Sunday; it is, after all, his first time being eligible in a while. 

It’s a great honour to be centre-stage on one of the biggest days of the GAA calendar, but from another perspective, it’s a poisoned chalice.

I’ve written before about modern-day hurling being fairly ungovernable, but it has seemed even more so in recent years: the sheer speed of the game makes it near impossible to keep up with.

The handpass is a case in point. When it comes to this aspect of the game, refs are damned if they do and damned if they don’t.

Much has been made this year of the relative lack of frees given for thrown balls: the consensus was that refs had decided as a group not to prosecute this bending of the rules.

It was a surprise, then, when a couple of handpass-related calls were made in the Cork-Limerick semi-final, most significantly Alan Connolly’s handpass to Brian Hayes for his unstoppable batted goal-that-wasn’t.

Watching, I felt sure these calls would matter in the end; it’s difficult enough to try to beat Limerick without disallowed goals making your task even more Sisyphean.

Thankfully, the result of the game wasn’t overshadowed by these erroneous frees.

The day before, in the Kilkenny-Clare semi-final, Eoin Cody was similarly penalised for a handpass executed from a prone position on the grass. ‘Throw,’ I said confidently, from my supine position on the couch. Then RTÉ showed it back: zoomed in, slowed down, enhanced frame-by-frame. Cody’s handpass was legit. Better than legit: it was perhaps the nimblest handpass I’ve ever seen.

Today’s players are so evolved that their ultraquick handpasses, like the flapping wings of a hummingbird, are almost impossible to perceive with the naked eye. 

And therein lies the problem: either a referee allows all handpasses, throws included, or he tries to apply the rule, without the benefit of the CSI-like enhancement enjoyed by the viewers at home, and inevitably makes a mistake.

Spare a thought for intercounty players in general, as they continue to balance work, play, and life, as well as having to put up with everyone’s expectations and projections.

A recent Shane Dowling column in the wake of the semi-finals caused a minor online kerfuffle. 

Dowling wrote graciously of Patrick Collins’s heroics, in particular his doublesave of raspers from Aaron Gillane and Seamus Flanagan: “I’d love to get a clip of that save and show it to people all over the world and ask them how much do they think Collins is paid to put his body on the line like that. I’d say they’d be astounded to hear he’s doing it for the love of his county.”

Aaron Gillane has his shot on goal heroically blocked by Cork goalkeeper Patrick Collins.
Aaron Gillane has his shot on goal heroically blocked by Cork goalkeeper Patrick Collins.

This provoked a predictable online response, with X users (I’m trying to get used to it) protesting this romanticisation of amateurism, saying that many intercounty players get cushy jobs, sponsored cars, expenses for days, and so on and so forth. ‘Shamateurism’ is the new term, I believe. 

I think Dowling’s point still stands, in that Collins was hardly thinking of his sponsored car when he stopped Gillane’s shot with his torso — he’ll have a nice round bruise there — but of course it is true that male intercounty players are ‘well looked after’, as they say.

But ‘well looked after’ is still a long way from being a professional sportsperson.

It’s something I think about a lot: with players bigger, stronger, faster, and more skilful than ever; with county setups professional in every respect but the pay cheque; are we facing a looming welfare crisis in the GAA? 

I often agitate for female intercounty players to get expenses, which of course they should; hopefully, with integration on the horizon, and the GPA supportive in principle, this will soon be a reality.

But the cost of being an intercounty player is not just monetary: it’s time, too. I often think about an episode of the podcast GAA Minor Moments in which Orla O’Dwyer, former Tipp camogie player and current Brisbane Lion, revealed the main difference between intercounty training and training as a professional sportsperson in Australia.

“We definitely train as hard with county and AFLW. The only difference is probably the time,” she explained. “We might arrive to sessions two hours before it starts, to make sure you do your pre-hab, you do your physio check-ins, your massage, and they really talk about how important it is to be properly ready to train.” 

It’s the same, she explains, after the session. 

“You don’t just leave straight away and go home, you do your ice baths, you get your food in, you do your recovery and cooldown… it’s just a longer process.” 

Instead of the two-hour session she would have had with Tipp, as a professional she takes five hours to perform the same level of activity, because — and this is the subtext — as a professional she is granted the time and space to protect herself long term. Even in this era of shamateurism, for GAA players, these benefits of time and protection remain elusive.

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