TECHNOLOGY AND HOW much we should use it. That’s a conundrum for our time.
Musicians have grappled with their own version for millenia and have long since concluded that the notes you leave out are as important as those you put in. And the more you leave out the better.
There is a lot we can do with technology in sport. How much is enough? We’ve had HawkEye in some of the bigger GAA matches since 2013 – do we want a video review as well?
Patrick Horgan thinks yes.
“If one decision has to be given then they all have to be given but something that’s going to decide the year (should be reviewed),” he said on William Hill’s The Square Ball podcast.
Horgan was of course talking about Conor Leen’s jersey pull on Robbie O’Flynn at the death of this year’s All-Ireland hurling final.
If anybody might have arrived at the conclusion that there should be more technological oversight in hurling then it is Horgan. In a parallel universe he might have a winners medal from 2013 had the final whistle gone when expected, leaving his late point as the telling score. And, who knows, perhaps Cork beat Clare in a replay on 3 August if Johnny Murphy sees the jersey pull on 28 July.
Only there isn’t one parallel universe, as Horgan himself indicates in the first part of his quote. There are several trillion.
If there is a video review in place then naturally the 2024 championship does not conclude with O’Flynn seeing his shot tail wide while Leen grips tight and hopes for the best. Every call of consequence in every championship game that has the available technology has to be looked at and history goes off in a myriad of different possible ways from the very first decision deemed worthy of intervention.
Even if such a system involved only a couple of challenges per team in each game, things have a way of taking on a certain momentum that is beyond our control.
We’d quickly end up like Father Ted trying to fix the dent in his car with a small hammer. “Whoops, I didn’t mean to do that, I’ll just tap it the other way.”
Sport reflects life in so much as it’s often boring, sometimes thrilling, but there is a flow to it all. Once something happens, it’s done and you just have to deal with the next moment as best you can.
We can try to alter the glaring mistakes of sport we wish had never happened but the first casualty is the natural rhythm of the game. Ultimately you will lose that flow and a lot of the thrill for the pursuit of a perfect reality that can never exist.
We’ve done our best to get as far into this without mention of Var – but how many players, coaches, supporters feel football is better since it arrived? Even the committed adherent to the system could not argue that we’re rid of contentious outcomes.
So many decisions remain six-of-one, half-a-dozen-the-other after several replays. This would likely be more the case in hurling, a faster sport and one where referees willingly don’t blow for every indiscretion because it would kill the spectacle.
You could probably make an argument for improved HawkEye if looking for tech fixes. There has been some criticism that decisions take longer in Semple Stadium, the ground outside Croke Park that has the system. And a means of checking whether the ball crossed the line for a goal would have merit. You would imagine O’Loughlin Gaels and the Cork U20 hurling team might agree. HawkEye and goal-line technology are not maddeningly intrusive, so long as the process is swift.
Still, there are easier ways to improve the level of decision-making and they tend towards investing in people instead of more machines. Were the match fee to referee county games to creep up towards, say, whatever amount of euro a recently retired player could expect to receive for appearing on the Sunday Game then the job would be more desirable.
That could be an expensive investment, but you’d argue it is money spent in a good area, and would improve the game for players and spectators.
That’s not to deride the job current referees at the top level are doing now. My appreciation for them grows every time I’ve stepped in when there is nobody available to ref our kids’ games. It’s grand when they are small but by the age of nine or ten the ball is flying around. ‘Oh shit, I’d better get myself down there’ you think after someone pings it 50 yards. ‘Ah . . . back the other way now,’ you decide as the sliotar moves up, down, crossfield and back a lot faster than you ever could. Were somebody to compile a video of every honest mistake I made during a game I’d be fairly taken aback by the result.
For somebody to do this job in front of a TV audience of more than a million, with 82,000 plus in the ground, with 30 primed athletes on the field and nearly all of them trying to get away with whatever they can, over more than 70 minutes plus stoppages and extra time, is staggering to me. The belt to the head probably didn’t make it any easier.
I’m sure that Johnny Murphy has thought many times about the foul on O’Flynn and the few others he missed, and felt regret. As a Corkonian I hope they haunt his dreams! That’s not true of course, the game is done, he did his utmost and the outcome is just the way the water flowed.
The most wise take on officiating calls came from Jimmy Barry Murphy when talking about the 2013 All-Ireland to Denis Walsh of the Irish Times.
“You’ve got to be magnanimous,” he said. “You can go ranting and raving and blaming everybody. If you hang around long enough there’s swings and roundabouts. We got away with a couple as well over the years.”
It’s probably easier for some like JBM to reach that conclusion than Horgan. He is an older man who has seen more of life, and won six All-Ireland titles at county level as a player and one as a manager. Horgan is still being referred to by many as ‘the best player never to win an All-Ireland’.
And Horgan, to be fair, has been a lot more restrained and generous than most would be in his situation. “I’m not going to blame anyone,” he said during the same podcast. “We lost the game and Clare obviously deserved to win.”
He can be this way because he knows what it’s all about. Chatting to Donal Óg Cusack on RTÉ before the final against Clare, the subject turned to how he loved training with the Cork team more than anything. The points battle with TJ Reid was of little interest. “All these numbers . . . what is it, like, do you know what I mean?”
He went on: “Even to win an All-Ireland, and you’ve won plenty. It’s one day, and you’ve a lot of other things that you refer to other than those three days that you had . . . I’ve so many things I look back to, like, and think, ‘that was class’ and not just . . . numbers and this and that.”
Horgan has lived an incredible hurling life. He continues to do so. Would that career have been so rich and full of beauty had a version of Var been stopping the tape at the most vital moments to decide whether he took six steps instead of four? Whether it was a throw or a hand-pass, a fair tackle or too aggressive? I’m not sure.
You could well be reflecting on a time in a less vivid, less intense sport that was no more free of questionable decisions as a result.
That would be a larceny far more grievous than anything that happened in the finals of 2013 and 24.
