After his first two National League games as Cork manager, Ben O’Connor’s post-match press conferences have dominated hurling’s news cycle: spiky, pungent, blunt, opinionated, divisive, compelling. Roy Keane comparisons are already flying around cyberspace, and it is easy to see why. Keane never put a tooth in it either, whether you agreed with him or not.
Not all of it is entirely new. A version of the thoughts he has expressed over the last fortnight have appeared elsewhere in the recent past. “At the moment, the standard of refereeing is cat, and it is ruining our game,” he said in an interview last summer to promote TG4’s Laochra Gael programme about him and his twin brother Jerry.
On Saturday night, however, he was at pains to say that his issue was with “GAA officials,” and that he “wasn’t blaming Liam Gordon [Saturday night’s referee] for anything.”
But he said that referees “are refereeing games by numbers now,” and that they’re worried about “a fella above sitting in the stand and he telling the referee, ‘You didn’t do that, you didn’t do that.’ Ticking boxes, that’s what it is, ticking boxes.”
READ MORE
The alleged scourge of referees’ assessors is a throwback to peak-Brian Cody. After Kilkenny beat Offaly in a Leinster semi-final in 2007, he said that referees were “being screwed” by an assessor “up in the stand, with a pen and a bit of paper, ticking, ticking, ticking boxes.”
It was a theme that Cody returned to again and again. His Kilkenny teams never looked for frees and were conditioned not to need them. Essentially, in the interests of fluency and “manliness,” he wanted light-touch regulation where rules were applied sparingly – as long as there wasn’t any blackguarding.
It’s the kind of sentiment that many or most hurling followers would sympathise with it, until their team is gasping for a free and they can’t understand why the referee hasn’t blown his whistle. It is always a circular, self-defeating argument: if you don’t want all of the rules applied, all of the time, when exactly do you want the rules to kick in, and which ones? And if one infringement is ignored how, in all fairness, can another infringement be penalised?
For context, Cork supporters would have been very glad of a free in the last seconds of the 2024 All-Ireland final when Robbie O’Flynn’s jersey was tugged in front of the Clare goal – even though it was a brief tug, and, of course, nobody was hurt. Cork were trailing by a point at the time. Clare won the All-Ireland.
Had other jersey tugs been ignored in other areas of the pitch during the game? Absolutely. Were Cork supporters happy that this is the kind of white-collar infringement referees should just ignore in the interests of letting the game flow?
Not when they were aching for a free.
“The game has to be refereed as the game itself,” said Cody, which in other language is the argument that O’Connor has been trying to make. That is a treacherous tightrope for any referee to walk, whether they’re under surveillance from the nameless, faceless assessors in the stand or not.
“We’ve harder battles in training [than was seen on Saturday night] and I’m sure every county is the same, because we don’t blow the whistle, we let them at it,” O’Connor said after the Tipp match. That carried obvious echoes of the environment Cody created in Nowlan Park too.
On Saturday night O’Connor addressed the issue of players being penalised for hurley contact with an opponent’s helmet or faceguard. His argument is that helmets and faceguards are designed to offer protection; he made that point in his RTÉ interview and in the press conference later.
The thrust of what he’s saying seems to be that we have become too squeamish about it. In a full-blooded game, where players are wiring into tackles, incidental or accidental contact will happen. As long as nobody is deliberately hitting somebody on the head with the hurley, we shouldn’t be so hung up on it.
In his promotional interview for Laochra Gael last summer he spoke about Tony Kelly being booked for catching Adam English on the faceguard with his hurley in a league game last year, causing a cut on the bridge of the Limerick player’s nose.
The same clip flew around social media last week in the context of Anthony Daly’s commentary on Mark Coleman’s slap on the side of a Galway player’s helmet in Salthill; Daly’s interpretation of the Kelly and Coleman incidents were markedly different. He – correctly – thought Coleman should have been penalised but was far more forgiving of Kelly at the time.
In the press conference on Saturday night, however, O’Connor brought up the Kelly incident to make his argument for more latitude in these cases. “That’s a free,” O’Connor said. “That isn’t even a yellow card. That’s a change of movement, you’ve got a tap of the hurley on the head, that’s what I’m on about.”
For clarity, O’Connor was asked if this meant a hurley making contact with an opponent’s helmet or faceguard shouldn’t result in a yellow card, let alone a red – which is how those infringements are provided for in the rules.
“They shouldn’t be a yellow card,” he said. “Some of them aren’t even a free, not to mind a yellow card. There’s no fella getting slapped down on the head.
“They’re trying to cleanse the game. And when I say cleanse the game, (I mean) something stupid like that, a little tap like that.”
On this score nothing will change, and nothing should change. Eliminating head-high tackles from the game has been a necessary and worthwhile campaign for many years. Accidents will happen, of course, but any attempt to change the level of tolerance around helmet contact would inevitably lead to more blackguarding and sneakiness. There cannot be any back sliding on this infringement.
Cork don’t have another game for three weeks. It’s going to be quiet around the place.
