Change Not Always a Bad Thing
Opinion

There has been a lot of controversy lately about the rule changes in Hurling and Football. For those who haven’t been following, the football modifications include requiring the goal-kick to be taken from a tee, and the pick-up rule to be abandoned to allow players to pick the ball up directly from the ground like in ladies’ football. In Hurling, there has been a slew of specific new offences like ‘digging in the ribs’ with the stick and other unsportsmanlike behaviour that would have been overlooked before now. Also, an added incentive to put the ball over the bar directly from the sideline cut has been added by awarding two points for this rare and difficult feat.

The biggest controversy of all has been concerning the sin bin, taken from Ice Hockey. The GAA implementation of this has been chopped and changed, abandoned, reintroduced and changed so much in the last month alone that it’s difficult to keep up with what the current rule is.

Regardless of which rule changes survive and which are abandoned, it is one of the strengths of the GAA that it carries out these experiments from time to time in the pre-championship competitions. Other sports could do well to learn from us. Take soccer. The offside rule slows that game down to a pedestrian crawl and should be replaced by something similar to the square ball rule in GAA. The goalie should be given a time limit of a few seconds during which he has to kick the ball back out after making a save, similar to the way a Gaelic goalkeeper has to keep on playing when he gets the ball in his hands. If Rugby hadn’t split into the Union and League factions, we may have ended up watching a simpler, understandable, and more flowing game along the lines of Rugby League during the Six Nations. It’d be difficult to see this happening though, those organisations just don’t seem to have the same flexibility as our own.

Rule changes in the GAA are nothing new. Goals were worth five points from 1892 to 1896 before being made equal to the three points with which we are familiar today. Up to 1896 the value of goals outweighed any number of points. A team that was ten points down could win a game with a single soft goal, so it was decided that the final score should paint a more accurate picture of who played a better game throughout rather than who got a single lucky break at the last minute.

We can and do learn from other sports. The adoption of the yellow and red cards is a good example of adopting some of the more useful aspects of soccer.

But not all experimental rules turn out to be improvements, and they are rightly consigned to history. The replacement of the opening clash with a puckout in the 2000 National Hurling League turned the explosive start to the game into a weak and lame opening just because of a single 'unseemly incident' in the Munster final of 1998 (Waterford v Clare) when Colin Lynch whacked across Tony Browne’s legs. Just about every other field sport in the world starts in the middle of the field, and none are as spectacular as a Hurling throw-in, so there was never any doubt in my mind that the this important part of our sporting heritage would be retained.

Mistakes have also been made on the presentation front. Remember when the cups were once presented in the middle of the field on a small plastic stage with ‘Guinness’ or ‘Bank of Ireland’ written on it? I always hated that. To me, getting a sense of a momentous national occasion required that the victors be viewed from below. They should be up there among the great and the good, high in the Hogan Stand or the Gerry Arthur Stand and flanked by the Taoiseach and the President, not marooned like eejits in the middle of an empty field with the rain lashing down on them.

There will doubtless be plenty more changes in the future as our games continue to evolve with the times to retain their unique combination of speed, skill, and athleticism. Something that I’d like to see tried out would be two referees on the field in Hurling. With the sliothar racing up and down the field at speeds that would set off a speed camera on the Freeway, it is not reasonable to expect one man to be able to keep tabs on everything going on near the ball, to say nothing of watch out for off-the-ball incidents. Australian Rules has multiple referees, so does American Football. There’s no reason why we can’t at least try this and other rules out in the National League sometime, although at lower levels of the association it's hard enough to get one referee at times. Who knows? Maybe some day we'll see refs like Frankie Keenan in Boxer stadium wearing black and white striped shirts, throwing little yellow flags into the fray, and eloquently explaining by microphone to the crowd why he has stopped play. Or maybe not. But there’s no harm in picking a bit of this and a bit of that from the best of other sports.