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Post by southward on Sept 21, 2017 21:49:29 GMT
www.independent.ie/sport/gaelic-games/gaelic-football/its-kill-or-be-killed-kerry-star-says-cynical-tactics-required-to-win-all-irelands-36153757.htmlI'm a bit disappointed at Paul Geaney's comments on the shenanigans in the dying seconds of Sunday's final. There's at least a tacit acceptance here that this stuff is no big deal, just part and parcel. Ok, gamesmanship isn't exactly new but we are seeing, let's say, newer and more inventive forms of cheating materialise. Players hurling projectles, interfering with equipment, pre-planned and choreographed fouling. Is this the next generation of cynicism, following on from the rise of sledging and rolling around holding the face to get a man put off? Paul isn't the first to shrug the shoulders at this stuff; the mindset nowadays seems to be that anything goes and the end justifies the means, no matter what. Some questions for debate... * What's next? Will we have backroom teams devoted to foul play and sabotage? * How low can you go? Is everything and anything acceptable if you want to win? Or is there a point where the game will just become ugly and dishonourable? * Am I just naive?
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Post by kerrygold on Sept 21, 2017 21:59:23 GMT
You think Dublin weren't verse on the way they closed out the last kickout, the way Connolly bought the free or the interference with the tee?
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Post by Deleted on Sept 21, 2017 22:18:57 GMT
Exactly, this level of cynicism doesn't just happen by accident.
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Post by southward on Sept 21, 2017 22:23:48 GMT
You think Dublin weren't verse on the way they closed out the last kickout, the way Connolly bought the free or the interference with the tee? Yes, quite clearly they were. But I don't want this thread to be about Dublin or Kerry or Mayo or even Tyrone. Nor to just descend into whataboutery. I suppose what I'm asking is....do people think that win-at-all-costs should be without limits or is there a point where the dark arts go too far and just devalue the whole thing? Personally, I think there's a growing acceptance of cynical tactics that I find a bit worrying. |
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Post by Annascaultilidie on Sept 22, 2017 5:07:37 GMT
I think your comments about going too far is key.
Ultimately this craic doesn't put the ball over the bar and a good referee will play extra minutes where time is wasted in a tight game.
The other issue is black cards in the last N minutes. This needs a rule change.
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Post by glengael on Sept 22, 2017 13:06:55 GMT
A good referee can't see everything though,that's one of the problems. How long did it take Costello's actions to come to light? And it would appear there will be no consequences so of course another team/ player will be encouraged to try that or something similar....
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Post by buck02 on Sept 22, 2017 13:13:45 GMT
Dont forget Barry John Keane in the 2014 All Ireland. If Donegal had goaled from the resulting kickout after he was booked it would have been karma really.
I dont say this lightly but Costello needs to get his payback from somebody early next season. Begley in the headlock in the ground last year, the craic with the tee and coming on and just holding onto Harrison and not letting go for the kickout. People will point to his 3 medals but they are tainted big time in my book.
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Post by kot on Sept 22, 2017 13:26:39 GMT
Sin Bin, Sin Bin, Bloody Sin Bin! But then, what consitutues a yellow vs. a black vs. a sin bin....... oh my head already!
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Post by Attacking Wing Back on Sept 22, 2017 14:12:33 GMT
Sin Bin, Sin Bin, Bloody Sin Bin! But then, what consitutues a yellow vs. a black vs. a sin bin....... oh my head already! The problem with the black card is the yellow card is used as a cop out half the time. Drop the black card and go back to red and yellow. Yellow means ten mins in the sin bin. Any yellow means 10 mins in the bin. No special designation of fouls like the black card nonsense. The black card doesn't confer any advantage on the attacking team anyway. The offending player could be replaced. The attacking team still only gets a free. In the sin bin they would be a man up. Also the black card doesn't make a difference to the top teams with a deep squad, you just replace a cog in the wheel. Being down a man would. |
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Post by kerrybhoy06 on Sept 22, 2017 14:22:52 GMT
Well a simple change from last weekend and Clarke's last kickout would be that the ref just gives a free up to where the wrestling has happened furthest from the Mayo goal.
So if Fenton wrestles his man in midfield then abandon the kickout and give mayo a free from there.
That would help to eradicate it fairly quickly
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Post by onlykerry on Sept 22, 2017 14:23:47 GMT
I think in the cold light of day we would nearly all be against cynical play and insist on it being cracked down on - however in the heat of battle and particularly if our team is involved we will have rose tinted glasses on the subject and therin lies the crux.
You would not be able to find a critical Mayo person for example if they had managed to "manufacture" a winning score by foul means last Sunday - the culprit would be canonised. Replace Mayo with any other county and the same would apply.
The only way to sort it in reality is for the punishment to be so severe it will not happen and even then it must be seen by the ref to be dealt with.
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Post by buck02 on Sept 22, 2017 15:07:14 GMT
Well a simple change from last weekend and Clarke's last kickout would be that the ref just gives a free up to where the wrestling has happened furthest from the Mayo goal. So if Fenton wrestles his man in midfield then abandon the kickout and give mayo a free from there. That would help to eradicate it fairly quickly Good point. What would be the difference between that and the small pull of the arm on Cillian O Connor for Mayos injury time free? |
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Post by givehimaball on Sept 22, 2017 15:07:42 GMT
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Post by kerrybhoy06 on Sept 22, 2017 15:27:09 GMT
Well a simple change from last weekend and Clarke's last kickout would be that the ref just gives a free up to where the wrestling has happened furthest from the Mayo goal. So if Fenton wrestles his man in midfield then abandon the kickout and give mayo a free from there. That would help to eradicate it fairly quickly Good point. What would be the difference between that and the small pull of the arm on Cillian O Connor for Mayos injury time free? Well I'm not sure but the only way to get rid of it is harsh outcomes for the offenders. If one of the Dublin half back line was caught doing that just before Clarkes kickout and was penalised with a free from 40 yards for Mayo that they got a score from- none of their players would do it again in a hurry |
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Post by Deleted on Sept 22, 2017 18:41:02 GMT
Costello will get what is coming to him. He is a fine talent but he is acting the maggot.
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Post by southward on Sept 26, 2017 17:59:34 GMT
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Post by buck02 on Sept 28, 2017 9:29:49 GMT
Kieran Shannon makes some interesting points in his piece in the Examiner this week. Most alarmingly is the train of thought that the current win at all costs mindset is only going one place - PEDs.
KIERAN SHANNON: There’s no acceptable cynicism. Let’s black ball the offenders
Back in 2004, long before several of Jack McCaffrey’s teammates hauled Mayo defenders to the ground to prevent them from receiving a kickout in the closing moments of an All-Ireland final, his father Noel, along with some other eminent academic colleagues, conducted a study into the attitudes of Irish athletes towards cheating.
What they found was that athletes essentially identified three distinct sets of rules: What was actually in the rule book, the officials’ interpretation of those rules, and then the players’ own code. The latter was what truly counted. It was only cheating, unfair, if you violated the players’ code.
In a sport like golf, the three were pretty much consistent. It wasn’t just the rule book or course officials who frowned on someone who replaced a ball a few centimetres closer to the hole. If you violated that rule, you violated the players’ code, even your own conscience. You just didn’t do it.
In team sports, they found the “moral reasoning” was considerably lower, especially in the GAA. At the time something like kicking an opponent on the ground or eye-gouging was viewed as unacceptable in the eyes of fellow players, but holding a forward’s jersey, or a forward pulling down a defender to win a free and fool a ref, was deemed fair enough.
“The referee knows that people are going to try and take an advantage so the onus is more on him,” said one Gaelic footballer who participated in the study. “If you get a chance to steal a few yards or hold someone’s jersey off the ball, you’re going to do it.”
Thirteen years on and that study can seem a bit dated. Sports have moved on and the researchers haven’t stayed still either.
One of them, Dr Tadhg MacIntyre, has also investigated attitudes towards doping and is currently researching the area of match fixing; he and his colleagues in the University of Limerick’s health research institute have teamed up with seven other institutions across Europe, conducting surveys and interviews with referees, players, and coaches with the view of preventing match-fixing and promoting values-driven behaviour in sport.
But he still keeps a close eye on Gaelic Games and has seen that while the sport has admirably reduced and even rooted out certain unsavoury behaviours, it has continued to tolerate and even spawn certain others.
It may not yet have spiralled to the level of base moral reasoning prevalent for so long in professional cycling where doping has been an accepted norm, but it has no reason to feel complacent.
“If we continue down the road where the outcome is the be-all and end-all,” he says, “we could end up where [GAA participants] could decide it is more advantageous to dope or to engage in match fixing and other murky activities. That threat is real. That cliff is there.”
MacIntyre is not being alarmist. He’s been rounded and reasoned.
As he notes, Gaelic Games has made considerable strides in the policing of its game over the last 15 years or so.
In his autobiography Shane Curran detailed brilliantly in a chapter called Crime and Punishment the absolute recklessness that prevailed on the killing fields of Roscommon in the early 1990s.
At the time he was considered one of the best corner-forwards in the county but after the continuous blackguarding he received off-the-ball, he headed off to America in disgust and would only play in goal upon his return. He saw another team-mate give the game up altogether after he had his teeth and jaw broken by an opponent.
In psychological parlance, such acts would be described as examples of ‘hostile’ aggression: where someone would act out of anger or frustration and a desire to see someone hurt or punished. The GAA has made huge strides in reducing the level of hostile aggression.
These days you’re a lot more likely to leave the field with your teeth intact — and not just because you have to wear a mouthguard.
There’s another type of aggression though which the GAA is struggling with — what MacIntyre and his colleagues would term ‘instrumental’ aggression. Here the intention isn’t to maim or even injure an opponent — it’s just to hurt and stop that opponent’s attempt to win. It’s nothing personal, strictly business. Cold-blooded, not hot-headed.
Nowadays a corner-back is a lot less likely to break a corner forward’s jaw — but he’s a lot more likely to engage in trash talking with him. And as the All-Ireland final illustrated, that corner-forward in turn is a lot more inclined to drag down that corner-back in the last minute to defend a narrow lead.
The GAA has made some strides in this regard. The introduction of the black card was an acknowledgement that too much ‘instrumental’ aggression — or ‘cynicism’ as GAA people more widely describe it — was going unpunished. As controversial as it has been and for all the hard cases and wrong calls it has triggered, overall it has been good for the game.
The Sunday Game panel often say they’re sick of reviewing black card incidents but what they forget is that they’ll never get to review all the challenges that DIDN’T happen because of the existence and threat of the black card.
Lee Keegan would not score as often as he does if there was no black card. He’d be hauled down a lot more often instead.
But if the black card is a factor in why this year’s All-Ireland final was probably the best of the last 35 years, the lack of a black ball to go with it is why the last minute of such a spectacle was so unedifying.
This column has been flagging this one for some time. On the eve of the introduction of the black card — and just weeks after another Dublin-Mayo All-Ireland final decided by a point — I wrote: “Teams will gladly take a couple of black cards in the closing minutes, further institutionalising and normalising such fouls.
A player won’t mind missing the closing minutes of a game if his act has made his team more likely to win. He’ll even relish the martyrdom of taking one for the team.
“But what if such deliberate fouls were punished on the scoreboard? Take Kevin McManamon deliberately hauling down Lee Keegan late on in this year’s [2013] All-Ireland final. In 2014 McManamon would most likely commit the same foul again with just minutes to go, even if it meant his team was reduced to 14 men.
But if the ball was brought to a mark 25 metres out from goal, Cillian O’Connor put it over the bar and play resumed with a Mayo free from where Keegan was fouled, he’d be less inclined to commit that foul.”
In other high-scoring sports they essentially have a black ball to go with a black card. In basketball, if you commit an intentional or technical foul, the opponent is awarded with free throws.
Sometimes those fouls are acts of instrumental aggression, daring the opponent to punish such cynicism by making the shot, executing a skill, but at least the opponent gets the chance to punish you with skill. In football, you don’t. And so, in 2017, Ciarán Kilkenny is still doing what Kevin McManamon did in 2013.
It’s not just Dubs. It’s Keegan himself, throwing a GPS at Dean Rock this year, wrestling Diarmuid Connolly to the ground two years ago. It’s supposedly all the top teams.
“I would expect it from anyone who has ambitions of winning an All-Ireland,” Kerry’s Paul Geaney said last week. “Kill or be killed. It is part and parcel of the game.”
But it doesn’t have to be part and parcel of the game. It’s only part and parcel of the game because the GAA’s culture and rules tolerate it.
If it’s the game Geaney and the GAA wants, fair enough, as long as they understand this: If it is all about kill or be killed and win at all costs, then the GAA — from Geaney’s clubfield in Dingle all the way to Croke Park — is not entitled to a single cent from the State.
All Government funding for sport, especially one that claims to be an amateur and community-based one, is working off the premise and assumption that sport is character-building, that it promotes the better values of humanity.
You watch the closing minutes of an NBA game and the spirit it is played in is no different to the closing minutes of an U15 game you’ll see in the Parochial or Oblate Hall tonight.
Stephen Curry will never stoop to throwing a GPS at LeBron James, or James will never resort to stealing Curry’s kicking tee. At what stage do we feel it’s fine for kids playing football — for the club, the community — to haul their opponents down and prevent them from taking a kickout? U14? U16? Minor? In 2021, will we again have to watch Dublin and Mayo men rugby-tackling each other in the closing minutes of another All-Ireland final?
Jarlath Burns and the rules revision committee are making strides to reward skill. The mark worked. The black ball would work too. Football needs more interventions and deterrents like it to shape a higher moral reasoning. Otherwise it’ll just continue to cheat itself.
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Post by southward on Sept 29, 2017 18:22:45 GMT
www.independent.ie/sport/gaelic-games/gaelic-football/id-have-thrown-my-jersey-at-rock-dublins-philly-mcmahon-says-cynical-play-in-gaa-is-here-to-stay-36179708.html"You're never going to get rid of cynical play. A player is going to do absolutely whatever they can - I would have taken off my jersey and thrown it at Dean Rock, to put him off."
"So this is the game. I am going to do what I can to win. Now, if it affects the team negatively and the result negatively, then it's the wrong decision.
"But that's what you're planning to do. There's always the opportunity to be negative. And that's why the lads probably did it in the last 10 minutes, because they saw the opportunity in something negative they were doing."
"Where do you draw the line? The referee sending you off, you know you've crossed the line then, and then you look back and you say, 'Jesus, was that the right decision' and how did it affect my team?"
McMahon pointed out that players will always test the boundaries. And on this occasion the black card rule was there to be exploited.
"I don't know how many times I have to talk about this black card thing. It would have much more impact if Ciarán got sinbinned and you had 14 men and they had a spare man to kick the ball to instead of kicking the ball over the sideline."
*********************************************************************************************** Not to be picking on Philly or even Dublin but this is appalling stuff to be saying publicly. Basically, he's saying I'll cheat any way I can to win and it's ok to do so. I'm pretty sure in other sports you'd be hauled up for bringing the game into disrepute for coming out with this. The GAA needs to send a message here.
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Post by Deleted on Sept 29, 2017 21:04:30 GMT
He is being honest. I had to laugh at his piece in the examiner where he said he will do whatever it takes to win for his charity.
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Post by southward on Sept 29, 2017 22:06:01 GMT
He is being honest. I had to laugh at his piece in the examiner where he said he will do whatever it takes to win for his charity. Fair enough, but would he be that honest if he thought there would be repercussions? Look, underhand stuff has always gone on and everyone's guilty of it. However, we now seem to be at the stage where cheating is being publicly endorsed and encouraged at the highest level of the game. Philly is, I'm sure, a hero to tens of thousands of young Dubs - what sort of a message is he sending here? And again, I'm not singling him out; he's not the only one. But we're on a dangerous path if cheating is being presented as acceptable, as desirable, as the norm. |
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Post by Annascaultilidie on Sept 30, 2017 6:21:25 GMT
Eh, are ye all missing the bit at the end where he tells the GAA what he would do to stop this?
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Post by ballynamona on Sept 30, 2017 7:05:08 GMT
Agreed, no point in censuring Philly for this kind of talk, nauseating as it might be.
The authorities need to stamp out this stuff by introducing adequate deterrents.
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Post by Mickmack on Sept 30, 2017 8:17:45 GMT
Black card offences after the 55th minute should be punishable by a penalty to the opposition. That would put an end to what we saw at the end of the match.
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Post by ballynamona on Sept 30, 2017 9:47:23 GMT
Black card offences after the 55th minute should be punishable by a penalty to the opposition. That would put an end to what we saw at the end of the match. That's a bit too extreme. Would be bottled. I think a clear denying of a scoring opportunity could be rewarded with a close-in free. |
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Post by Mickmack on Sept 30, 2017 10:37:36 GMT
Black card offences after the 55th minute should be punishable by a penalty to the opposition. That would put an end to what we saw at the end of the match. That's a bit too extreme. Would be bottled. I think a clear denying of a scoring opportunity could be rewarded with a close-in free. As Philly says the black card is there to be exploited in its current state. I respect his honesty. And are you seriously telling me that Joe would bottle a decision to give Mayo a penalty into the Hill in the 76th minute.  Anyway, the authorities should have the nous to come up with rules to stop this happening at the end of games. |
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