But for the chaos at Dublin Airport, members of the GAA’s Central Competitions Control Committee might well have been spotted fleeing the country on Sunday evening.
Their annus horribilis continued at the weekend as another mass brawl was beamed out to a watching TV audience at the end of normal time in the Galway-Armagh All-Ireland quarter-final.
There followed the usual reaction. Outrage. Why can’t the GAA control this sort of thing? What disposition leads footballers and hurlers instinctively to misbehave when certain situations occur?
The answer is quite simple. There is no cast-iron connection between undisciplined misbehavior and proper penalties – punishment that poses such a disruptive inconvenience to the perpetrator that whatever advantage or indulgence was perceived in the rule-breaking becomes not worth it.
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Talk of the “cultural” problem is in a way misleading because it implies fatalism, something that’s ingrained and can’t be altered without fundamental readjustment.
Most examples of our cultural tendency to disregard rules or norms, from drink-driving to illegal parking and smoking in prohibited areas, have been addressed by substantial sanctions that are enforced with cold-eyed inevitability.
Even in the GAA’s world, the fashion for escaping suspension by scuttling to the courts to get temporary injunctions was stopped in its tracks by the establishment of the Disputes Resolution Authority.
The mere existence of the DRA was enough to shut off the legal escape route and now, even the GAA’s independent tribunal doesn’t see much business from suspended players chancing their arm.
Sunday’s eye-gouging incident, featuring a member of the Armagh extended panel, is expected to be a prime topic of the current CCCC investigation, which may well run for a couple of days as they take care to get i’s dotted and t’s crossed.
It’s not listed as an infraction in the rule book but for reference World Rugby, the global leaders in having to deal with sports-related gouging recommend between three months and two years for “intentional contact with the eyes”.
It has been the CCCC’s sorry duty to try to impose discipline on playing field delinquencies and, having worked hard at delivering considered recommendations, their frequent fate has been to watch proposed suspensions being challenged for no good reason and then dismissed.
Focusing on Sunday, they would have realised that another case of “contributing to a melee” was incoming.
That’s the infraction for which Galway captain Seán Kelly and Armagh joint-captain Aidan Nugent were dismissed before the start of extra time. It is expected to be up to the players to opt for a hearing and try to prove that weren’t doing any such thing.
Kelly though was seen running across the pitch when the melee was starting even if his actions thereafter suggested that he was trying to put out fires rather than further inflame them. He will presumably look for a hearing and there is speculation that he will argue mistaken identity.
On the broader issue, there is a view that Armagh’s challenge to similar charges, demanding what specific infractions had occurred, arising from the league match with Donegal has driven a coach and four through the viability of the infraction.
Is that true?
“Contributing to a melee” began its star-crossed existence as a new infraction in 2007.
Fifteen years ago this month, the GAA was exercised by the events before a Cork-Clare Munster hurling match, which entered the collective consciousness as “Semplegate”, when Cork hurlers were suspended under the fledgling rule for brawling before the start of the 2007 championship match against Clare.
Confirming suspensions for three Cork players, the Disputes Resolution Authority accepted that the infraction was necessarily broadly based.
“In the absence of some special meaning being attributed to the expression ‘contributing to a melee’ the words must be given their ordinary meaning. Clearly therefore the offence [these days, infraction] can cover a multitude and that seems to have been the intention of the Association in enacting the new rule.”
Even after the fiasco last April, the GAA was sufficiently reassured by the Central Appeals Committee’s written decision to issue an advisory to referees stating that “contributing to a melee” was still a viable rule for enforcement and encouraging them to provide very basic levels of detail if their decisions in this area were challenged.
CAC didn’t strike down the infraction of “contributing to a melee” but placed a couple of obligations for further detail on a match referee when enforcing it.
Referees are obviously integral to implementing all rules and there are signs that they struggle. In these pages, Kevin McStay made the point that in his role as a television analyst, he sees certain fouls go unpunished every week.
Demanding that match officials impose “zero tolerance” may be a counsel of perfection but a lot more could be done to encourage such an outcome. Referees end up as the hunted when the attempts to impose penalties get to hearings.
One intercounty referee was made to answer around 50 questions by a lawyer acting for suspended players in an attempt to catch him out. He stuck to his guns and prevailed but how is that in any way appropriate for the rules – signed up to by everyone taking the field – of a voluntary, recreational organisation.
The CCCC, under pressure now as “not being fit for purpose”, are unhappy at the legal standards being demanded of them. The decision of the Central Hearings Committee to identify a significant flaw in the use of email at one stage of the disciplinary process didn’t appear to be based on any of the rules and was contradicted by the GAA within days. Yet three suspensions for readily identifiable, televised infractions were annulled.
The problem for referees is the same problem for the whole GAA. All of the moving parts in the disciplinary process are not in sync and bad behaviour isn’t sufficiently inconvenient to the miscreants.
email: sean.moran@irishtimes.com
